[James20884]

But seriously. In Europe, people don’t hate Americans invidually or even as a whole. But some of the effects of the United States’ foreign policy (an area I suspect the majority of American don’t really care about) are hated. Maybe just the simple things like militarizing all of Latin America to fend off a Communist threat, bombing Laos and Cambodia back to the Stone Age, supporting a racist regime that wants to keep land it’s conquered from neighboring countries and evicting people who aren’t of a certain religion.
Fortunately (or unfortunately), these are my personal reasons for giving Americans grief when I meet them. Other reasons for resentment might be the way your culture is exported around the world and the whole concept of marketing and commercialism, which is so pervasive. I know in England I can go to any town I like and be guaranteed to find one of every major chain store. Carbon-copy land. Obviously this isn’t something you can blame on the United States. People all over the world like this aspect of Capitalism – it’s just that the United States got there first, so it looks like they’re to blame. Note: Whenever U.S. tourists turn up in Europe, you can bet the first place they go to eat is a McDonalds, America’s second embassy (yes, a sweeping generalization, but still…).

Other aspects that don’t go well in Europe about Americans is the way the whole political spectrum is shifted to the right. And that politicians can actually make comments about being proud of not having a passport and be respected for it, i.e. Jesse Helms. There was an excellent spoof on the Internet about how the Internet was opening up the minds of Americans and how they were resenting this fact. ‘Why do I want to read about the Serbo-Malaysian civil war when I’m browsing Yahoo?’ Maybe that would highlight this point.

Basically my simple answer would be how could you NOT understand how people from other countries can hate Americans?

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Name : James20884, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Agnostic, City : Munich, State : NA, Country : Germany, Education level : 4 Years of College, Social class : Middle class, 

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