Here: most of the time during the cold war our attitude towards the US was friendly: we saw the US essentially as a big, young, go-ahead, prosperous country a lot of Italians had emigrated to in the 19th and early 20th century.  We watched a lot of US films, danced US dances, imitated American-type clothing - some still do. So the US was a "trend-setter"- it had an image of modernity, big open spaces, fast highways, tall building  - but we didn't actually TALK about it much "as such".. it was remote, somewhere "over there" = both familiar (movies) and exotic (different climate, language, customs, food...).

In the vietnam war years the left protested against the needless slaughter but, as has already been pointed out elsewhere on this diary, this did not imply  hostility to America-as-such as at the same time it was emotionally and ideologically linked to the American left and its culture. Plus we did not feel personally threatened = south-east asia is too remote from Europe. However, the US-promoted military coups in Chile and Argentina plus ditto in Greece just when we were being "strategy of tension" Gladio-bombed were scary... so we feared a US-backed military coup - but carried out by our OWN far-right - i.e. not involving US planes bombing our villages and cities and US marines shooting into our crowds and kicking down our doors pointing machine guns at us and screaming at us to lie flat on the floor or they'd blow off our heads, as you have been doing to our Arab neighbours in Iraq.

 

"Ignoring moralities is always undesirable, but doing so systematically is really worrisome." Mohammed Khatami