An amazing post - I think one of the best, or at least significant. Soft Power is the gift that keeps on giving - young Germans growing up after 1945 (in the West of course) never forget the spirit with which Britain & America helped rebuild W Germany in the decade or so after WWII. It was a British engineer who got the VW plant churning out Beetles soon after the fighting was over. Thousands of US & UK soldiers were stationed there and got to know local people. The Beatles played in Hamburg. The Russians were kept out. Reagan told the Russians to tear down the Berlin Wall.
What do we have now? A geriatric US president who falls asleep in mock cabinet meetings and is infatuated with a damaged Russian dictator… the world watches and waits for a decent US president who can rebuild relationships. All we can do is wait for the 25th amendment to be used.
China, India and other nations look on with amazement as this foolish president throws away America’s strongest card - the fact that America was admired for its freedom, prosperity and culture. Who wants to be like the US now? A win for China, life support for a doomed Putin - a weaker, less influential America.
Now tell us how the destruction of NS1 & 2 by the US might haved contributed to the declining soft power of the US in Germany for instance, and of the standard of living and competitiveness...
Thanks for the history lesson and the tangled economics. Education may also play a role in the current trumpist relationship with Eutope. As American education puts less emphasis on civics, geography, and world history, memories of anything older than 20 years fade into iphones, youtube shorts, and wastebook. Why America is looking less and less admired by other nations is not surprising as the trump admin shows its disdain for decades long, positive relationships as it coddles war criminals, Honduran narco terrorists (unless they are on small boats), and accepts genocide as a real estate opportunity. George Santayana famously stated, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' And the only thing trump knows of history is Donald Trump's ex-wife once said Trump kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. If trump didn't love Hitler, US would not be looking to leave NATO and embrace fascism.
I don't know if the mask is coming off or the hood is going on. I have no illusion that America being a righteous land from its inception, since the incidences of slavery, genocide and internment camps show otherwise. As MLK popularized and Theodore Parker observed, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". I can only hope that is the case.
What cuts here is how innocence is stripped from consumption. Soda turns into archive, branding into memory work, taste into geopolitics. I hear something familiar: empire doesn’t announce its decline with collapse, it shows up as awkward localization and historical amnesia leaking back in. Soft power fades quietly, and people notice it first in their mouths, not their theories.
Though women were made full equal members of our Republic the day it was formed, and they became fellow republican-democrats with men 11 years, 11 months, & 7 days later when our Constitution was ratified (June 21, 1788), representation among our public servants in Government has not kept with the times. This is how we change that:
This trend of global brands trying to look more local is something I've been observing in Turkey in the last couple years as well. It's part because of the dynamics you mentioned (plus local brands trying to gain an advantage from this by pushing that message) and also anti-Israel sentiments combined with conspiracy theories ends up targeting brands like Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola always does similar campaigns in here but they also used the same campaign in here as well. Also companies like Shell, McDonalds, and Nestle in recent years have focused on this messaging too.
But the most aggressive one of those came from Fanta in recent months. Since 1990s all orange sodas are called "yellow cola" as a shorthand and Fanta decided to embrace this and used a famous comedian as their brand face to look as local as possible. Which was unexpected because they were avoiding to address this term for decades and actually push their brand name harder to make it go away.
The Americans who care about "Europe" (whatever it is that they imagine that might be -- it's not terribly clear. EU? A continent? A region? A collection of nice holiday destinations?) aren't terribly large in number, no matter how outsize their representation in "the chattering classes" aka "the coastal elites." The Atlanticism of this "American aristocracy" doesn't interest the "American gentry" (you know -- the fellow who owns of a group of car dealerships in "flyover country"), nor do their globalist liberal international pieties. The interests of the empire aren't necessarily those of the nation ...
Perhaps it's merely personal confusion but it seems to me that Fanta, regardless of where it originated, is huge in South America. And its sales in America are expanding due to the slowly spreading influence of Latinos.
There was an emigration wave of the then German elites to Latin America after 1945. It probably has nothing to do with it, but maybe the seeds were sown there.
Very interesting stuff. But I thought Star Wars was modeled on the Vietnam War rather than WWII (and I believe George Lucas even says so himself)...
An amazing post - I think one of the best, or at least significant. Soft Power is the gift that keeps on giving - young Germans growing up after 1945 (in the West of course) never forget the spirit with which Britain & America helped rebuild W Germany in the decade or so after WWII. It was a British engineer who got the VW plant churning out Beetles soon after the fighting was over. Thousands of US & UK soldiers were stationed there and got to know local people. The Beatles played in Hamburg. The Russians were kept out. Reagan told the Russians to tear down the Berlin Wall.
What do we have now? A geriatric US president who falls asleep in mock cabinet meetings and is infatuated with a damaged Russian dictator… the world watches and waits for a decent US president who can rebuild relationships. All we can do is wait for the 25th amendment to be used.
China, India and other nations look on with amazement as this foolish president throws away America’s strongest card - the fact that America was admired for its freedom, prosperity and culture. Who wants to be like the US now? A win for China, life support for a doomed Putin - a weaker, less influential America.
Fascinating! But SW (1977) is not a WWII movie: if anything, it’s a Vietnam movie. See Immerwahr: https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/daniel-immerwahr/Lucas.pdf
Now tell us how the destruction of NS1 & 2 by the US might haved contributed to the declining soft power of the US in Germany for instance, and of the standard of living and competitiveness...
Thanks for the history lesson and the tangled economics. Education may also play a role in the current trumpist relationship with Eutope. As American education puts less emphasis on civics, geography, and world history, memories of anything older than 20 years fade into iphones, youtube shorts, and wastebook. Why America is looking less and less admired by other nations is not surprising as the trump admin shows its disdain for decades long, positive relationships as it coddles war criminals, Honduran narco terrorists (unless they are on small boats), and accepts genocide as a real estate opportunity. George Santayana famously stated, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,' And the only thing trump knows of history is Donald Trump's ex-wife once said Trump kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. If trump didn't love Hitler, US would not be looking to leave NATO and embrace fascism.
Does your American "education" include the atrocious behavior of the US around the world since (at the latest) the Spanish American War?
Trump is just the mask slipping. This is who you have always been all along. See Ronald Wright's "What is America?" for a start ...
I don't know if the mask is coming off or the hood is going on. I have no illusion that America being a righteous land from its inception, since the incidences of slavery, genocide and internment camps show otherwise. As MLK popularized and Theodore Parker observed, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". I can only hope that is the case.
What cuts here is how innocence is stripped from consumption. Soda turns into archive, branding into memory work, taste into geopolitics. I hear something familiar: empire doesn’t announce its decline with collapse, it shows up as awkward localization and historical amnesia leaking back in. Soft power fades quietly, and people notice it first in their mouths, not their theories.
Historicsal reset, thanks
Though women were made full equal members of our Republic the day it was formed, and they became fellow republican-democrats with men 11 years, 11 months, & 7 days later when our Constitution was ratified (June 21, 1788), representation among our public servants in Government has not kept with the times. This is how we change that:
https://open.substack.com/pub/republia/p/for-the-preservation-of-freedom-and?r=4ucf6d&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
This trend of global brands trying to look more local is something I've been observing in Turkey in the last couple years as well. It's part because of the dynamics you mentioned (plus local brands trying to gain an advantage from this by pushing that message) and also anti-Israel sentiments combined with conspiracy theories ends up targeting brands like Coca-Cola.
Coca-Cola always does similar campaigns in here but they also used the same campaign in here as well. Also companies like Shell, McDonalds, and Nestle in recent years have focused on this messaging too.
But the most aggressive one of those came from Fanta in recent months. Since 1990s all orange sodas are called "yellow cola" as a shorthand and Fanta decided to embrace this and used a famous comedian as their brand face to look as local as possible. Which was unexpected because they were avoiding to address this term for decades and actually push their brand name harder to make it go away.
The Americans who care about "Europe" (whatever it is that they imagine that might be -- it's not terribly clear. EU? A continent? A region? A collection of nice holiday destinations?) aren't terribly large in number, no matter how outsize their representation in "the chattering classes" aka "the coastal elites." The Atlanticism of this "American aristocracy" doesn't interest the "American gentry" (you know -- the fellow who owns of a group of car dealerships in "flyover country"), nor do their globalist liberal international pieties. The interests of the empire aren't necessarily those of the nation ...
Perhaps it's merely personal confusion but it seems to me that Fanta, regardless of where it originated, is huge in South America. And its sales in America are expanding due to the slowly spreading influence of Latinos.
There was an emigration wave of the then German elites to Latin America after 1945. It probably has nothing to do with it, but maybe the seeds were sown there.