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Comment by fcantournet | Hacker News Reader

Because it sort of did in that they provided support for UK and even the USSR that might have tipped the balance, not to mention operations in Africa.

But really it's because there was a deliberate and concerted effort to erase the USSR's role in defeating the Nazis in western europe, after say 1960. Through public education, and general coverage in medias/fil/documentaries. The US cultural hegemony is real :)

It started earlier, but at the time when the Communist Party was at 30% in a lot of countries and 90% of the workers where in unions the disinformation worked very poorly.

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> The US cultural hegemony is real

Looking back at my childhood growing up in a small NATO country (The Netherlands), it really strikes me. I found a box of my childhood drawings at my parents place. I’d drawn soldiers and fighter jets etcetera and they mostly had US flags. Some kind of militaristic nationalism is common in many places I guess but apparently I had grown up emotionally attached to the US military.

> Through public education, and general coverage in medias/fil/documentaries.

On children’s television, every year I’d see interviews with the American and Canadian soldiers that liberated the Netherlands. Which of course is important but… I watched an item on Auschwitz were they managed to talk about the history and liberation of the camp for twenty minutes without ever mentioning the country that the liberating soldiers came from.

  > The US cultural hegemony is real...

  > I’d drawn soldiers and fighter jets etcetera and they mostly had US flags...

I think this is the cleverest and most insidious thing the US has managed to do. For some reason, in spite of their appalling record: only nation to use atomic weapons on civilians, practiced apartheid for decades, has been continually at war with 'someeone' since the end of WWII, brutal prison system, death penalty, trigger happy police, etc. etc. so many people all over the world still see the USA as "cool". It's unfathomable to me.

I've said many times that; in a lot of European and west-leaning countries, you could literally sell people dog-shit and they'd chomp it down with relish --as long as you called it "American Style" and put a stars & stripes on the packet.

The US is a super power built on stolen land with stolen labour and stolen IP that really "came into it's own" on a tide of stolen valour post WWII.

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