Elias Isquith: You’re in Brazil; what has the unrest in Baltimore looked like from outside the U.S.?
Glenn Greenwald: I think that sometimes it’s hard for people who are Americans and living in the United States to appreciate the vast gap between how they’re taught to think about America and how the rest of the world perceives America. This has probably been one of the most eye-opening things for me from living outside the United States now for as long as I have, which is an appreciation of just how viscerally the rest of the world sees that discrepancy. Obviously there’s polling that shows that if you ask people around the world who the greatest threat to world peace is, overwhelmingly they’ll say the United States, which most Americans find bizarre, to the extent that they’re aware of it at all.
The perception that America has a radical problem with race and that it has become an extremely abusive penal state are very widespread in the rest of the world — or at least lots of parts of the rest of the world — and it’s also quite accurate. Just from my own experience, when I talk to people in Brazil about things like Ferguson or Baltimore, there’s not a surprise or bewilderment; it’s sort of a confirmation of the fact that America has a serious problem with racism and that police abuse and this abusive penal state seems to be getting worse.
via “It’s pure authoritarianism”: Glenn Greenwald exposes the link between Baltimore’s uprising and the NSA – Salon.com.