Liberal delusion.
The US crashed the entire world economy after a massive wealth concentration “golden age”. Millions died as a result. That depression created the conditions for the second world war. In the run up to that, the US was very much supporting the fascists, with most of our business leaders providing funds and openly collaborating with them. We had Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden. The second largest fascist movement was right here in the US.
And then WW2 started and we did nothing. Not until the Soviets actually showed they could put up a fight. And we got involved so that we could stop the spread of communism, not to stop the fascists. Evidence? The US collaborated with the Vatican to safely evacuate 10k Nazis and place them all over the Americas, sometimes through the monastery system and sometimes just openly in governments. When the US built West Germany openly Nazi politicians were elected into positions of top leadership. NATO was staffed with Nazi officers. And one of the top missions of NATO, Operation Gladio, was to organize Nazi collaborators throughout all of Europe, including in those territories liberated by the Soviets, to create armed violent militias that could be activated to fight the Soviets if NATO required them to.
Black/white apartheid was the law of the land well through WW2 until it finally started to break in the 1960s. Even then racial apartheid had become endemic, systemic, and the idea of repairing the damage done was never further from realization. By the 1970s mass incarceration and massive expansion of the parole system created a carceral system worse than anything the planet had ever seen. It imprisoned more people than the Soviet GULAGs ever did.
And THEN Reagan showed up.
This graph represents a professional white middle class perspective, completely isolated from the violent and heinous reality of the country and so insular as to be delusional from the perspective of the majority of people in the world
I don’t laugh at erasure of atrocities.