In the America I thought I grew up in, George W. Bush would have been drummed out of office the moment the American people realized he was rendering people to be tortured by ruthless dictators. September 11th changed how we thought about our vulnerabilies, and it made us rethink things like our visa application process, and the sharing of information between our various intelligence agencies. But it should not have changed our principled support for human rights, due process, and the constitution.
I don’t recognize this country anymore. A Vice-President, polling at 19% with his chief of staff under multiple indictments, is publicly lobbying to allow cruel and inhumane punishment of people ‘suspected’ to be our enemies.
One of my earliest political memories is of my father fulminating against President Ford for pardoning ‘that crook Nixon’. My father was no liberal, and he would go on to become one of those famous Reagan Democrats before swearing off both parties. The country I grew up in was willing to force a popularly elected President out on his arse when it became obvious that he had no respect for the rule of law.
To some extent, the unforgiving attack on Bill Clinton over l’affair Lewinsky followed in this pattern. Even when the public was willing to give Bill a pass, there was a certain logic in demanding our public officials be held to the highest standards of conduct.
My public school fed me a steady diet of outrage over the human rights abuses of the Nazis, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union. The term ‘political prisoners’ was a dirty term. Our right to dissent was celebrated at every turn.
And when the Reagan administration flirted with the South African regime, or Latin American right-wing death squads, the left led a successful counterattack. If our country sometimes fell short of our own principles, we knew what we stood for, and what we stood against.
We stood against totalitarianism. If we sometimes allied ourselves with tyrants, we did so in the interest of combatting the greater evil of the Soviet Union.
But consider where we stand now:
From Dana Priest’s Q & A in today’s Washington Post about our secret gulags in Eastern Europe:
“The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”
Could you elaborate on your decision not to publish the names of the countries? Frankly, I find it amazing that The Post would withold such information from the public. Don’t you have a duty to the public — both American and foreign — to report the news?
Dana Priest: The decision was made by our executive editor, Len Downie, after many hours, over many days, of conversation and debate with a small number of people, myself include. So I can’t speak for Len on whether it was an easy decision, but it certainly didn’t feel like it. To me, it was a question of weighing the relative benefit to the story of naming the countries (exposing an illegal act in that country, authenticating a program that’s been denied by the administration and that rests of unnamed sources) versus the potential risks of naming the countries; most notably that they might decide to curtail valuable counterterrorism cooperation with the US and that they might be subject to terrorist retaliation. Using the formulation “several Eastern European countries” seemed to address the authenticity and impact question.
Imagine our World War Two allies refusing to acknowledge that they were holding Nazi prisoners because they were being tortured. These unnamed countries are operating gulags to hold people suspected of being our enemies. These people have presumably plotted to kill innocent civilians. And yet, our allies are unwilling to even admit they are assisting us in taking these people off the street. It looks as though the Eastern Bloc is still intact, but they have new masters. We have become what we were supposed to vanquish.
Republicans have never been very good in the human rights area. The trouble now is that not only have they stopped paying lip service to those principles overseas, they have actively sought to eliminate them from our country as well. All for some illusive “security.”
Well, my experience is that when governments start violating their own citizens’ rights no one is very secure anymore.
It looks as though the Eastern Bloc is still intact, but they have new masters. We have become what we were supposed to vanquish.
Ah yes… that’s the “New Europe” Rummy is so taken with…now we know why.
“Meet the new boss… same as the old boss”
all of this, and my husband fights with M.I. guys he works with every single day about their justification for torturing who ever where ever! It’s sickening!
I don’t recognize my country any more either.
I was watching an episode of “From the Earth to the Moon” last night. Afterward I commented about how nice it used to be, back when I was proud of my country. Now I’m elated when a prosecutor does his job, or when Senators force the other party to act responsibly. That’s followed by shame over the fact that such small things, things that shouldn’t even happen, are all I have now.
On a recent trip to Boston, my parents, my wife and I went to go see Magnificent Desolation, the IMAX film Tom Hanks helped produce that showcased some of the never before seen moon footage. (oh and sponsored by Lockheed Martin, I might add too)
At the end, they have this montage where all these kids talk about wanting to go to the moon (this was at the aquarium, so it’s mostly geared towards kids, but nevertheless really cool to watch)and how we might just go back there some day.
And I left my theater shaking my head, utterly devastated, it just was so sad, because I knew it would never be a reality. We don’t have the resources, the human capital, or the will power to do it, and since there’s no money to be made on the moon, capital will never approve it. You know what the kicker was? I’m sure somewher I knew this in my gut, but when Tom Hanks told the audience, I was still shocked, all of what happened with Apollo was coordinated by a computer with less memory and processing power than an everyday calculator.
When we’ve made technological improvements many many orders of magnitude beyond that, we still can’t find a way or the will to go out and continue to explore space. Because with today’s computers, it’d be a snap.
I still get shivers down my spine when I watch the old Apollo footage (and I wasn’t alive back then to see it). The sheer look of utter amazement on Cronkite’s face when Armstrong steps off the Eagle just sums it up to me, wow, if we can do this, we can do anything. To me, it remains one of, if not the most important accomplishment by humanity. It’s like the explorers of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries saying, “Well that Columbus guy’s already been there, so no need for us to go.” (putting aside the question of whether it actually was “progress” for Europe to discover the Americas)
And we let it all get away. We’re more concerned today with letting corporations loot national treasuries and rape the environment all in the name of the almighty dollar. We measure our success by how much we’re worth and how well we keep up with the Jonses. In the era where everyone talks about the next big thing, the newest creation, the latest fad, how better are we really? We’re not progressing, we’re just spinning our wheels faster and faster, still stuck in the mud, and the tank’s running out of gas.
I’m still shocked every time I realize that we can’t just go back to the moon whenever we want. The people who did it in the 60s are gone. We don’t have that technology any more. We’d be in better shape to do it than we were in the 60s, but it would still be a massive expenditure — one we don’t have the will to make.
I’ve long though that our most fundamental purpose as a species is to explore. We don’t do that anymore, and it’s not only sad, I think it’s dooming us.
If we didn’t torture people, we wouldn’t have to hide…
Having to hide anything is, by the very concept of a democracy, anti-democracy…
We’ve come full circle, back to the bad old days of the early 50s. Unfortunately, we don’t have a leader with any shred of integrity. Eisenhower, at least, finally came out against Joe McCarthy. Now, we’ve a whole gang of McCarthys, led by Dick Cheney. Bush will never come out against them; he’s one of them.
And the Washington Post? Maybe it’s editors should see George Clooney’s new movie, Goodnight and Good Luck. Maybe they can learn how real newspeople act.
I wish you peace and I’m glad you’re back.
I think the conditions that allowed this to happen are slow and pervasive. Life has become more impersonal. Americans are literally rootless–none of us live where we were born, and the closest a lot of suburbanites get to a sense of community is smiling at that one girl who always makes the latte at “your” Starbuck’s.
As we add population, we have added infrastructure in a cookie-cutter fashion. The same retail “pods” pop up everywhere. I couldn’t tell you if I were in Denver or Toledo or Tulsa by looking around. TV is the same everywhere, local sports team is a complete oxymoron, and the money that in the past would have supported local arts now turns into a kickback to get Sam’s Club to move in.
At many levels, society is telling you You Don’t Matter. You are on your own. Hope you can afford On-Star for your Tahoe, because otherwise it’s not safe to leave the gated community. Or, hope you don’t get sick, because neither the government nor the hospital have any intrinsic compassion for you. Sorry, it’s just business.
Some of this is the inevitable byproduct of aggressive industrialization. Some of it is cultural–the elites who set the tone for everyone simply worship money.
In either case, the idea that government is different from any other corporate entity, or even responsive to the people, is lost. It’s very hard to discuss civics in a land where Powerball numbers matter more than vote counts.
Interestingly enough, Philip Slater in his 1970 book The Pursuit of Lonliness, American Culture at the Breaking Point cites exactly those conditions for the decline of American society. When I read it a couple of years ago, I found the comparisons between the Vietnam era and this era quite ironic.
after I finish Direct Actions by BostonJoe.
These are my own conjectures, supported only by Garraty’s The American Nation from high school and other sources like the anti-SUV book High and Mighty and the always entertaining magazine Adbusters. When society itself is dehumanizing, it’s hard to feel empathy for others.
I believe I read something in Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger along similar lines. He was writing about the bombardment in modern culture of all sorts of lies – from advertising to politics – and how it has a tendency to do real psychological damage to people. How can people understand and comprehend reality (forget all the existential questions about the nature of reality for a second) if they almost never confront it? And BushCo has taken the vile art of doublespeak to an entirely new level.
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luckily no transcript or trace he ever was on with his bs – what a shame!
Place Ed in a rocking chair with old Zell – they both lost it!
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
Genocide and slavery. Imperial wars, corruption, apartheid. Clear cutting of forests and strip mining. Columbus Day, Thanksgiving, and the Christmas Consumerama. Henry Ford. Iran-Contra. Vietnam and Cambodia. Allende. Nazi rocket scientists. Japanese internment camps. Mossadegh. The S.S. St. Louis. Fred Hampton. Rhonda Africa. Dick Rowland. Medgar Evers.
Now do you recognize your country?
no. that’s absurd. I could tackle those one-by-one, but you have totally unrealistic expectations of our country and our history.
And what does Iran-Contra have to do with anything?
Your version of history places the cart before the horse. Different peoples developed their technologies at different rates, leading some peoples to dominate others. At the same time this was occurring, the founding fathers developed principles that called into question the justness of might making right, and enshrined dignity and rights in the individual. Those principles have been developed in fits and starts and always in competition with regimes and empires that put the state above the individual.
Colonialism and imperialism must be seen in a broader context of historical and political development than just pointing to the fate of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, and the U.S.’s imperial roles.
Without our influence and ideals, we wouldn’t have those ideals to violate.
Perhaps. But do you know what they are?
I expect everybody to take each action, each day, with a reverence for all things. And I expect us to help each other realize this goal.
In this way, our technology might lead us to lift up others not dominant them.
Our founding fathers “enshrined dignity and rights” only in special individuals.
Iran-Contra is an example of egregious wrongdoing and blatant disregard for the principles of government laid out in the constitution. However, many of the players are considered heroes, and some are deeply involved in the Iraq war and our current foreign policy.
In any case, my list was meant to point out that our history is ripe with examples which represent the opposite of what you long for. And I am not happy about it. But without recognizing our history for what it is, then we might have some trouble building the future we want.
true enough. i too am of a generation who sat at our parents knee and heard the stories of the nazis and japanese warriors who murdered indescriminantly soldiers and civilians alike, of the soviets and their prison gulags.
but take a step back and observe that the moral righeousness of the post-war liberal america was in relief to that of the communist world that counted 1/2 the world in its camp.
there is no counterbalancing economic ideology that forces the west to uphold some moral values anymore. there is nothng, not “islamo-fascism” certainly that had the reach of soviet communism to force us to show our side is different than the worst humanity has to offer.
with the death of rosa parks, one should remember that the communists used the fact of americn segregation to good effect in the ideological and propaganda sphere for decades after WWII. a driving force for de-segregation and full enfranchisement of the black race in america can be seen in america’s need not to have such a propaganda weapon in the hands of their economic and ideological enemies.
i grew up right outside philadelphia in the 1960’s. many of my clasmates were jewish and had either parents or close relatives who survived the nazi death camps. it would have been immpossible for us youngsters to think that now decades later america has gulags all over ther world where people are held without any rights.
my honest opinion is that relgious fanatics on the right have poisoned the well of secular society and have pissed in it with the same absolutism that made the nazis so effective.
the vision they have is “Here, as it is in Heaven.”
and need anyone be reminded that their Heaven is an absolute monarchy and not a democracy?
The events of September 11, 2001 have been used in the most shameful and despicable manner by the Bush regime to get the public to assume that such draconian measures as torture are necessary for our safety.
Of course this argumentthat torturing captives enhances our security is patently absurd, and yet many people are quite convinced that torture, while a regrettable thing to have to do, is essential and to oppose it is unpatriotic, as though if you oppose it you’re a traitor.
We need to spread the message that renouncing the most basic principles and human rights we hold to be of value has absolutely nothing to do with making us safer and defeating our enemies. We need to spread the word that by allowing and approving torture, we magnify the jeopardy our own soldiers and citizens are in by several orders of magnitude. We need to spread the word that if America condones and practises torture that we are, as a nation, completely undeserving of any accolades as chasmpions of anything good and noble on this earth.
BushCo has brought more shame and dishonor on this country than all the former presidents combined. Even Nixon and Reagan weren’t this sick and insane.
…Central America. There was no successful left counterattack against the Reagan administration. The Guatemalan generals killed 200,000 Mayans and the man Reagan praised and funded – Efrain Rios Montt – never went on trial or paid for his crimes. The Iran-contra affair caused the Ronzoids some momentary grief, but it didn’t stop the terrorists from bombing clinics and schools and driving the Sandinistas into a harder and harder line approach that eventually cost them their popularity and political clout.
And this, “We stood against totalitarianism. If we sometimes allied ourselves with tyrants, we did so in the interest of combatting the greater evil of the Soviet Union”, BooMan, could come out of a speech by NeoImp Jeane Kirkpatrick. In fact, that’s exactly her point of view, that there was no “moral equivalence” between the KGB torturing and killing people and the CIA doing so, between Soviet support for revolutionaries and U.S. support for death squads.
Don’t fall for this trick. It’s the same as William Buckley’s notion that the repression and murders of Pinochet, like those of Franco, were justified and that these men were saviors given the alternative.
I agree with you about Central America, and I would throw in South America too, where I spent quite a bit of time during the late ’70s and early ’80s, (Argentina). the idea that the US govt. stood against “totalitarianism” in that part of the world is ludicrous. We empowered the most vicious and depraved dictatorial regimes in the history of the hemisphere.
It was a running joke amongst the pseudo-aristocratic classes in Argentina and elsewhere during that time that the easiest way to get mountains of money from the US was to declasre you were fighting communism and kill a bunch of intellectuals.
Our government only opposes totalitarianism when those practising it threaten to interfere in our own domination of preferred regions of the earth. We’ve been empowering merciless dictastors around the world for many decades and turning a blind eye to theirserial atrocities as long as they gave us what we wanted and capitulated to our authority on demand.
BushCo of course has taken all of this into another dimension, one where even the pretense of equality amongst allies and mutual respect for vested interests is abandoned. Now the regime seeks through force of arms and economic extortion complete domination of everything of value. Even the Saudis know it’s now only a matter of time until we attack them. Even my friends in India, people who are benefitting from the increased business ties with the US, are expressing to me their subtle dark anxiety, their fear that the US will ultimately betray India too, if not militarily, economically and by disrupting their flow of oil by assaulting Iran.
No one I know anywhere in the world trusts the US government.
As for the broader philosophical part about decline, it strikes me that consumerism and raping the environment for short term gain, that WalMart shopping and clearcutting timber operations, are hardly reliable foundation stones upon which to build and maintain a civilization. We need a lot more than that if we’re going to continue to evolve.
is that I don’t totally disagree with Jeanne Kirkpatrick.
Saddam is a perfect case in point. The alternative to Saddam was either another person much like Saddam, or perhaps a religious government that would not have been likely to be much of an improvement for the Iraqi people, or perhaps civil war, or perhaps an even more Soviet aligned regime.
Bush is learning that there is a reason why we tolerated some of the autocrats in the region. We simply didn’t have the desire or means to develop democracy in the region at the same time we relied on it for a supply of energy.
Scowcroft says he told Rice that we tolerated tyrants in the region for 50 years, but we also had 50 years of peace. Well, the region didn’t have 50 years of peace, but they did have some benefit from the relative stability that the autocrats brought. And we certainly benefitted with low energy prices.
We can’t complain that we didn’t push for democracy hard enough and at the same time complain that we shouldn’t be meddling in their affairs.
If we had meddled by pushing for democracy, we also would have been pushing instability.
I don’t have a simple answer for this. But at least I recognize that it is complicated.
As for Latin America, how many far right dictators are there now in Latin America? How many communist regimes? The results there are decidedly mixed.
I guess the “thing” for me has always been “why do we (the US) feel that we get to decide?
If the people of a particular region/country continue under a communist or socialist “regime” and are NOT torturing people, bombing other countires or basically doing what the US does every day under the asupices of “a higher moral ground” (total fucking bullshit, BTW), then who the fuck are we to go into those countries with our guns and soldier and bombs in the name of what is “right”??
I have plenty of friends, who are not Americans, who, if it were up to them (which it isn’t, just like it isn’t up to me how to run the secret prisons), would LOVE to take the US out of its “superpower” (what a joke) place in world affairs. WE ARE THE ROUGE NATION.
200 plus years and counting.
Some call it exceptionalism, some call it Manifest Destiny, in some circles it is still wryly referred to as the White Man’s Burden. I think people are working on a newer, more attractive name for it. I’m sure the PPI folks are all over this problem, and they may already have thrown out some release candidates that I just missed when I read their very impressive PNAC revision.
S2 has given a concise blurb of its practical application within the context of US history.
A side effect of advances in technology and communications have given Americans an unprecedented opportunity to examine some of the differences between what they were taught in school and the perceptions of the rest of the world, as well as a wealth of information about US policies and practices over the years, resulting in a small minority who have begun to question, even undergo some softening of support, for the doctrine, but significant opposition has yet to develop, and as the US middle class is phased out, such an eventuality becomes increasingly unlikely.
The correction may begin, not from a terrified world population awakening to the knowledge that it will not have anything to lose for much longer, but from the US underclass, as it continues to grow both in size and desperation level.
except for a number of factors you are failing to consider. For instance, the perceptions of the world about America change over time, and have changed a lot in recent years. At the same time, many Americans are changing their perceptions about America, as our legacy becomes tainted by BushCo.
Frankly, in the rubble of the two world wars, it was America that took a leading role in dismantling the colonial system, even as we took on some of the administrative and business concerns previously handled by the British, French, Dutch, Spaniards, and Germans. We enacted the Marshall Plan, and we protected Western Europe from communist encroachment.
From the perspective of a third world citizen, there is a lot left to be desired in terms of their own political and economic autonomy, as well as the fairness of the UN system. Yet, the aspirations and expectations of the third world are born of the ideals layed out in the charters of the League of Nations (with all their mandates) and the United Nations. The very concept of self-determination was foreign to Europeans vis-a-vis the third world until Wilson began agitating about it.
In an alternative universe the people of Falluja might be suffering under the yoke of Turks who have no time to consider their right to self-determination and have no compunction about going all Armenia on their ass.
than Europe, and I understand that this is, like medical treatment as a commercial product, a point of pride for mainstream Americans, however, just as domestically, your underclass may sometimes struggle to appreciate their good fortune in being protected from the evils of socialized medicine, nations that have been variously “helped” by US magnanimity in replacing France and Belgium here and there will similarly experience something of a disconnect in enthusiasm between the “leaders” approved by US to ensure that US business interests come first, and the populations of those nations, who may understand completely the US devotion to exceptionalism, as well as the exalted and beloved position of the corporations, find themselves unable to embrace these beliefs.
On the other hand, exceptionalism is admired enough so that there is to be found in some circles a growing interest in imitating it 🙂
several strategies available to counteract the Euro-American dominance of the early 20th century. Japan demonstrated one possibility: learn their magical arts and apply them yourselves.
Ghandi demonstrated another, and Indians have gradually come around to a more humane version of the Japanese model.
Another possibility is offered by post-war Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Germany…all living with a high standard of living and excellent civic life.
Or you could ally yourself with Soviets in the vain hope that emulating that odious system might bring great benefits to the masses.
But, it seems to me, that a failure to learn or embrace the West’s magical arts, combined with an inability to cultivate an indigineous political culture, in combination with an obsession with victimization, is responsible for the current state of affairs in the Middle East.
Ever since World War One we have been living in a global economy, where the powerful nations have both needed and wanted access and control of the energy sources the world economy needs to operate.
And it is disingenous to blame America for playing that game more successfully than the Soviets, as if it would be better to be dominated by a latter-day Politburo.
It’s also silly to ask by what right the Western Powers thought they could determine the forms of government of the region. Was this question seriously asked of the Ottomans? It wasn’t a matter of right, it was a matter of what was possible.
We can keep going back over what the standard of living would be of Arabs and Persians if oil had never been discovered and exploited, but even to this day the Arabs and Persians have not found a way to do this on their own without outside financing and expertise.
If the Western Powers had not brought their magical arts to the region the modern world would not exist either there or here.
of the Majority World as simple, child-like creatures who are unable to understand complex concepts and processes is extremely popular, and one of the dearest held beliefs, not only in the US, but throughout the West.
The spirit of Thomas Carlyle lives, his flame tenderly tended, and the westerners are, in my opinion, as entitled to these beliefs as they are entitled to enjoy liberty from the reading of history, which some anti-American writers have suggested may have existed even prior to the European invasion of the Americas.
My objection is to the weaponization of these beliefs. It is fine to believe that only red-headed left-handed Lithuanians are capable of learning the multiplication tables, even to believe that they were chosen by God to be the sole humans who should even attempt it, as long as you keep it as a cherished belief, and refrain from doing harm to yellow-haired, right-handed Lithuanians who have the audacity to state publicly that two times two is four.
There is no question that had US and UK made some different choices, that things would be different today in the ancient lands.
However, it would not have been pragmatic, then or now, nor served US business interests, to have democratically elected governments accountable to an educated and informed populace in the lands where America keeps its oil.
That’s hardly the way to run a client state.
The reality of western “superiority” is that it is limited to number and potency of population reduction materiel.
That is enough for the mainstream. I consider it as a good sign that you begin to think it is not.
several mistakes here.
You are putting the West in a no-win situation where we are the masters of the universe, blames for acting and for failing to act, blamed for what happens and what does not happen.
And you act as though we were the only imperial power interested in the region.
You seem to accept our exceptionalism as a fact, but to object to it as a fact. You can’t have it all ways.
to “create” democracy or anything else in the Middle East.
If the US, specifically, has an interest in democracy, it is my opinion that a move in this direction would be perceived as a good thing, both by the US underclass itself, and the world’s people.
Likewise on the question of modernization. I confess to having had hopes that US would modernize, and I still believe that such a development would benefit people in the US and elsewhere.
The primitive notion of my tribe is bestest is not an American invention by any means, nor are Americans the only ones who still cling to it.
However, it is Americans who have most diligently pursued it to the exclusion of all else, sacrificing even the health of their own little ones to effect its incorporation into the equally primitive doctrine of “might makes right,” an ideological behemoth in which moral superiority, or moral anything, is a file not found.
I accept that exceptionalism is a beloved doctrine, for which Americans are willing to jettison even the abstract possibility of those lofty notions of liberty and justice extolled in children’s textbooks.
I accept that for a minority of Americans, and you may be among that minority, that there can be a degree of uncertainty if the exceptionalism is truly worth a chance at a future, a chance at legitimate statehood, maybe even democracy and modernization one day.
Those are facts.
Another fact I accept is that no matter how strongly Americans may believe in their exceptionalism, the view is simply not shared by most people in the world, and superior destructive capability, even the vast mass extermination resources US possesses, have reached a point of very rapidly diminishing returns.
That is also a fact.
You have every right to your belief that the west invented science.
So many of these folkways would be truly charming if their adherents would just stop slaughtering people.
can be said to have invented science, I suppose it would be either the Ancient Greeks, or perhaps, a few individuals like Galileo, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Liepzig, and Newton.
But determining who invented science is not really important. What is important is who utilized it to gain power over other nations and cultures and what they did with that power.
And it is just as relevent that the religious right is undermining the power of America through their rejection of science today, as it is that people in the Muslim world did not embrace science and ‘innovation’ during the critical time when their fate as permanent third worlders was sealed.
And the decision to embrace science and weaponize is a morally neutral consideration. As is the failure to do so.
For the people of Najaf, they were overtaken by Khan, then the Turks, then the British, then the Americans. I don’t assert a moral failing of their failure to weaponize adequately to prevent this from happening, but I do note that that failure explains their repeated subjugation.
And if they are looking to blame anyone, they might begin by blaming themselves before they bemoan the ways of the world. Because we have never yet figured out how to keep the well weaponized from dictating to the not so well weaponized.
And the system that we tried to erect to correct for this failing of human nature was the imperfect system set out in the United Nations, wherein every country’s sovereignty is guaranteed, and universal human rights are respected. That the UN tends to serve the powerful is only an indication of how difficult it is to slow the powerful down.
That America has abandoned those ideals in a desire to revert to the days of old does not remove the fact that we did more than anyone else to enshrine those ideals.
in addition to the fact that history (including science) existed in many places besides Europe for quite some time, is that the big deal of these American ideals was that they should apply to all white male property owners, not just ones whose fathers had titles.
This was the great notion of genocidal European invaders, a colony of a colonial power that went on to become an even greater colonial power, and if I am not mistaken, actually lagged a bit behind “Old Europe” on the reframing of slavery.
It is true that no nation with the possible exception of Somalia has quite the same obsession as the US for defining itself by how many and how powerful are its weapons, how brutal its gunmen, how wide the seas of blood it spills. Not even the Soviet Union in its heyday could compare. (They provided housing, and health care).
Hitler might have liked to, but he did not have nukes. Maybe Ghengis and Atila, but I don’t think they did as well in the domestic support department, but to be fair, they didn’t have TV.
But the real problem with your argument is even if the US were not born of genocide and suckled on slavery, weaned on apartheid and fattened on bloodlust and greed, even if the US invented science and never had slaves and freed them all way before France and even in the “founding fathers” had intended all that liberty and justice to extend to both men and women of all races and creeds, that still would not justify the premise that the US owns the earth and all it contains.
That still would not make the US an “exception” or give it the right to interfere in, control, establish as client states, invade, occupy, or in any way bother other countries.
I think you can argue that US did have the potential to modernize, to do good, both domestically and internationally, but different choices were made, and Americans have a tough choice to make about those ideals.
Do you want liberty and justice for all? Do you want to become a legitimate, peaceful, responsible member of the community of nations, with a future, or do you want exceptionalism?
This is not a decision that the world can make for the US. The American people alone can decide this.
No matter how strongly Americans may believe in their exceptionalism, no matter how many countries they invade, how many people they torture and kill, the rest of the world simply does not share the belief, and will not.
And you cannot expect 5 billion 700 people to sacrifice the future of their own countries, their own children, for a belief they do not share.
is the precise historical argument that I am rejecting. It is filled with anachronisms, as well as attributing to the founders an belief system that is far more narrowly framed than was the truth.
The constitution was a compromise the idea men made with the power brokers. And democracy was expanded gradually as those ideas gained currency and the populace became more educated.
The idea that America had no right to intervene in others affairs is a pointless assertion in the context of the 20th century. Either we did it, or someone else would do it, usually with much worse consequences.
If I see you on the street, and see that you are smaller and weaker than me, should I hit you in the head and take your money, because whether I do or not, I am of the opinion that somebody else will, and besides, I want your money for myself so it will be better for you if I mug you. Somebody else might hurt your head even worse, and I would not have your money.
Still, I see some progress there. In pre-historic times, the larger caveman would not have felt the need to add the part about somebody else will hit your head worse.
That reflects the beginning of a moral objection to the basic premise of I big you small, me hit you head!
I have a certainty that you will be hit on the head and your money stolen and that money will buy a bigger gun than I currently have.
Herein lies the difference between you and me.
I know my enemy (circa 1950) is not someone in Basra, but someone in Moscow. If Moscow is looking to rob Basra, I will rob Basra first and be glad to have thought of it.
55 years later this will look like an awfully callous thing to have done. But after losing over a half million men five years earlier to fight a war against Nazis and imperial Japanese, I was not in a mood to consider the fine points of Basra’s right to be left alone in the abstract, when I knew they had not and would not be left alone (hit in the head).
The real exceptionalism isn’t an assertion that America is exceptional alone, but that the world powers are exceptional. If we need oil and tungsten to keep the Soviets at bay, then we are going to go get that oil and tungsten. And we have that ability, that makes us exceptional.
Adding to that is that fact that the Western Powers were the ones pushing for what little economic and political self-determination was to be had in those years, while the Russian espoused bullshit populist poppycock.
Let anyone seriously assert that the world would be better off under a Soviet yoke than the one we bequeathed to the world at the end of the Cold War.
The error is to think that the Cold War was solely won through a battle of ideas. It was won though a control of resources too, and through systems of financing large projects to utilize those resources.
The oil-rich nations got hit in the head because the oil was needed by the big powers. We learned the lessons of World War Two and we were not about to see the oil-rich nations succumb to anyone but ourselves.
This is the story of different peoples at different stages of technological development. And yet we attempted to set up a system to mitigate against a world based purely on raw power. Those ideals are the same ideals that make people question what right we had to dictate terms in the Middle East. Kinda of like biting the hand that tries to feed you, unless you insist on seeing the world as governed by abstract principles rather than harsh realities.
here is one. Empires fall. Bullies are eventually vanquished.
I will agree with you that human progress has been slow, one of my favorite examples to prove it has occurred at all is that people are now tortured behind closed doors, in most places, as opposed to in the public square.
Another piece of evidence that you yourself have alluded to: All countries, tribes, polities, do not make military aggression and empire their raison d’etre. It is true that if you give seven men a stick, not all of them will use the stick to hit the others. Some may use it to fish, others to draw pictures in the dirt, another may use it to reach high fruits, one will tie it to a child’s weak leg, to strengthen it. The man who uses it to hit heads is not inherently superior, nor is he the definer of civilization.
Some of the former colonial powers have learned that colonialism does not work. Empire does not work. They are not sustainable modalities, they are short term snatch and grabs. There have even been some moves toward the notion that the very purpose of a state is the well being of its own people, as opposed to filling the coffers of king and court, some stirrings of taking a longer view.
And I think that is where we differ. I understand, as Rome finally did, that at some point, even bread and circuses will not cut it. Even old Europe style colonialism, where schools were built and bureacracies established, did not work.
They did not work for the same reason it would not work for you if Malaysia were to colonize the United States, oblige you to learn Malaysian and forbid you to eat hot dogs. Even if they built schools to teach you Malaysian and provided you with all the roti canai you can eat. If you did not ensure that the venture became unprofitable for Malaysia, your grandchildren would. Even though those grandchildren might speak Malaysian as a first language, and eat roti canai all the time, barely aware of the existence of hot dogs. Increasing amounts of Malaysian resources would be required to “crack down” on the anti-Malaysian sentiment of your Malaysian-speaking, roti canai eating grandchildren, in whose veins might even run Malaysian blood.
The people of Malaysia would suffer increasingly, as their blood and sweat, were expended not for their own benefit, but on trying to maintain the US as a colony and extract from it resources for the king and his court.
The cave man’s might makes right does not work in the long term. At some point, early man realized that both he and the smaller guy could do better for themselves if they cooperated. If they could enlist enough neighbors in the plan, the whole cave cluster even had a chance at saving their berries from the really big bully across the river, and at some point, even that big bully might get a clue and realize that in the long term, he too would be better off by cooperating.
This is small progress, I admit, but it is the direction in which the world is going.
US, on the other hand, considers itself to be an exception, and is going backwards, as if it thought that the reason Rome fell was because of the bread and circuses provided to the Romans. So US decided to cut out the bread. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
As if it thought that the Raj failed because Britain built schools and municipal buildings. So US will just slash and burn.
Now I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that colonialism classic was better. The purpose of colonialism is not to provide a benefit to the colonized people, and whatever benefit may be eked out of colonial institutions is greatly offset by the horrendous damage done, as you point out, generations after Rwanda ceased to be profitable to Belgium, exploitation and exacerbation of ethnic rivalries are just one of the wounds colonialism leaves, wounds that take longer to heal than Europe has been (for the most part) out of the colony business.
The criticism of US’s decision to let the Rwandan genocide run its course was pointing out, as I believe another poster has, the inconsistency. There is no such thing as a US “humanitarian intervention.” There are situations which have the potential to generate revenue for US business interests, and situations which do not, though the proliferation of “disaster capitalism” may change that.
US may have promoted lofty ideals to you as a schoolboy, but what they have practiced on the world is very different. And in the view of the world, the US is not an exception to Rome, or the Mongols, or any other empire or colonial power. What sets the US apart is that it has more and bigger weapons than any other entity in history and constitutes a grave and imminent danger to the continuation of human life on earth.
Now that may be what the American people want, but there are only 300 thousand of them, out of world population of 6 billion, and as I said before, there is a point where sheer military force and weaponry reaches the point of diminishing returns. And oh, what do you know, hello! Here it is now!
If the US wishes to continue to destroy itself, I do not believe the world can stop it, and I doubt the world would speak with one voice on the question of whether it ought to try.
But on the question of destroying the world, there is a near-unanimous consensus against it, and I do not see a likelihood of making an exception because it is America who seeks to destroy it.
Well, I’m not so sure that it has all been “in recent years”.
From the persective of a third world citizen, I don’t think you can speak, not really. Many Americans have little to no clue about how their own leaders/government affect their OWN lives, let alone how the machinations of international collaboratives (who give not a rat’s ass about nations, mind) affect the entire world system.
US exceptionalism in ANY arena (and I speak as someone who has lived in 3 other countires, and spent time in 2 others) is a crock — I used to walk a road in Japan that is 3.5 times older than the USofA — and WE are the ones all should look to for moral guidance?
This is asinine — we are like the teenager that knows all, listens to no one, thinks he is immortal and that everyone else should just step off.
I have been waiting many a year for the US to get the good old fashioned bitch-slap she deserves for most of my life — it ain’t happening from within — it’ll be interesting to see who, from without, steps up to the plate.
The rest of the world is not as dumbed down, not even in those other third world countries, as the US populace is.
Your entire comment here is terrific; right on the money in every respect.
As a born and raised “American”, I have to say I’m embarrassed by the notion of American “exceptionalism”. The arrogance of it, the hubris necessary to support such a concept is an affront to the very ideals upon which our country was purportedly founded.
I’ve been fortunate to travel a bit in the world, and while I certainly appreciate the creature comforts my country affords to those of us fortunate enough to be able to work hard and take advantage of opportunity, I have to say that I find the levels of willful ignorance amongst my fellow citizens here at home to be far higher than pretty much anywhere else I’ve ever spent any time. And I find this very disturbing.
(Note that I’m talking about willful ignorance, deliberate ignorance, not the kind of blameless ignorance that requires no effort and that results from lack of exposure to ideas and principles.) There’s a very important difference between the two.
with these leftist criticisms of American power are twofold:
In my opinion, they represent a very unsophisticated and naive historical understanding. Ultimately, I find them insupportable as historical or political critiques.
There are a number of ways to judge history, but it was Enlightenment ideals that excelled over all competitors, both from a technological point of view, and from a political point of view. All the ideals that we assail America for not living up to, are ideals that were first tried here. Those ideals eroded slavery, eroded sexism, eroded the Divine Right of Kings, eroded clerical authority, and led directly to the UN charter, Geneva conventions, the ideal of self-determination, etc.
We scream when the religious right violates Enlightenment principles, but we don’t get upset when whole regions of the world reject them, as though they have a right to oppress their people.
There is too much hypocrisy here. Are we responsible for the world, or are we culpable for the failure of whole regions of the world to embrace and utilize Enlightenment tools and ideals?
We decided to buddy up with the House of Saud, but we didn’t tell them to impose Wahhabism on their population. Should we have dictated that Arabia become a democracy? Were we wrong to support secular regimes in Teheran and Baghdad? Should we have refused to do business with them until they had perfected representative democracy?
We have not always lived up to our own ideals, but we have done more than anyone else to promulgate and protect those ideals, which are now turned around and used against us when we torture people, or invade a sovereign nation, or use indiscrimate violence against civilian populations.
In my version of history, no one payed much attention to those concerns before we (and the French) began talking about universal rights.
If we want to lose our place as a beacon of rights and freedom, we can continue to follow the Bushists vision of a post Cold War world. And we will lose it, rapidly. Other nations have internalized our ideals to a point that they no longer need to look for us to protect those ideals, and perhaps they are better guarantors these days than we are.
But to say that America hasn’t been exceptional in shaping the modern liberal institutions we all claim to revere, is just rank nonsense.
First of all my critique is not a leftist critique. It’s a critique based on the evidence of actions that have resulted in serious long term, institutionalized depradations perpetrated or otherwise empowered by our government at various times throughout the course of recent history.
Secondly, and most importantly, I have no quarrel with “American ideals”. I happen to think our Constitution is a stunning and noble document. And I believe that many of the ideals expressed and defined in the Constitution are exceptional, just as I value much of what we’ve accomplished within our American society.
No! My complaint is that my government only pretends to honor these ideals while simultaneously violating them with increasing frequency and intensity. This is the gripe. This is what burns me the most; the false sanctimony, the utter hypocrisy, the near total lack of courage to openly acknowledge what the real motives are that drive our government.
If BushCo would just come out and say ; “Look, the oil supply is dwindling and we have to start taking action militarily in the Middle East in order that when the time comes we will be able to seize control of more of that oil to keep our society functioning a few months longer”; if they said that, I wouldn’t agree with the policy but at least I’d be able to respect the honesty. As it is, the charade of altruism, the “spreading freedom and Democracy” bullshit just makes everything worse.
If we are going to pursue these kinds of things, if we choose to follow the path whereby we seek to gain at the expense of our neighbors, then lets stop pretending we stand for things that we are unable to practice. Freedom and liberty for the few at the expense of the many has not one iota of nobility inherent in it. There is no exceptionalism in such a posture, and if anyone thinks there is, I fear we’re in worse trouble than I thought.
Right now, as a society, I’m sorry to say that we are far too selfish to be granted the status of representing something “exceptional”. We have come to buy the myth of exceptionalism and now use it as justification for our sense of entitlement; we use it to support such notions as that we have the right, because we’re Americans and we can do it, to buy these big gas guzzling SUVs and drive them around with impunity. Sure we have the right, but the destructive legacy such wasteful and selfish behavior will impose upon the world and our own children is the thing we should be paying attention to, and if we didn’t have this idiotic and counterproductive myth of our own superiority, we’d be more likely to think about such things more responsibly.
We think that because we’re superior that this empwers us with some sort of moral duty to impose our beliefs and system of government on others. This is unaldulterated rubbish. We have nosuch right, and we are long past the period where we stand as a positive model for other countries to emulate. The sooner we begin to accept the sad reality that we no longer represent the epitome of political civilization, the sooner we’ll be able to set about repairing the damge and setting a new course for our society into the future. As long as we remain in Denial, enmenshed in the trap of the exceptionalism meme, we will inevitably slip further behind.
But here is the rub. It is precisely our failure to impose “our beliefs and system of government on others” that infuriates so much of the left.
In other words, if we ignore Rwanda we are terrible, but if we tolerate Assad that is okay, if we intervene in Haiti, that’s okay, but if we intervene in Grenada, that’s insane. If we ignore the UN in Kosovo, that’s okay, but if we do it in Iraq it is criminal in and of itself.
And those are strawmen, so let me give you the real goods.
Sadat was a Russian tool that we flipped, Saddam was a Russian tool that we kinda flipped to neutral, Pakistan was our ally, the House of Saud were our best buds. Were we to blame for assisting these thugs and developing commercial and security relationships? Should we have left those things to the Soviets? Should we have told those countries to throw out their leaders and develop a democracy before we would do business with them? Do we dictate what kind of government they have? Or do we make agreements with those governments and agree to assist them and help them maintain their power so that our contracts will be respected and the Soviets will be frustrated?
Where is the consistency and where is the realism in these arguments?
Lastly, it is an odd kind of expectation that wants our government not to seek an advantage in the world. Especially when confronted with competing ideologies like fascism and Soviet communism, and a competition over energy resources between us. All I object to is an overidealized picture of what it took to make America the prosperous place that it is. As though none of these ugly tradeoffs had anything to do with our prosperity, or as if they would ever be support for losing our prosperity in some kind of altruistuc urge for absolute equality among nations.
Yes, the tradeoffs were ugly, the “prosperity” is lipstick for greed, chunked and formed from the blood and bones and entrails of millions who are now billions.
America made a grisly bargain, and now as the notes come due, some begin to read the fine print, and not all are pleased with the balloon payment clause.
There are rumors, even of some soft stirrings of buyers’ remorse, as the radical fringe with cockamamie ideas that those ideals just might have been worth even more than money gaze around the room at their rotting, necrotizing purchases, now emitting deadly gases, and exploding here and there, interrupted by the shrill ringing as the collection agency calls again.
I think you are missing the central point of my perspective here, and maybe I’m just not articulating things well.
I actually don’t think I know any “lefties” that think we should impose our system of government on unwilling neighbors. similarly, the only people I know who advocate imposing our beliefs on other nations are rightwing extremists.
As grand as it might sound to say that we “flipped” Soviet stooges in Egypt and Iraq, our interests in the region had virtually nothing to do with Soviet communism. there was no idealism involved. No model of American “exceptionalism” was at work there. It was about power and power only. We, the US government, was simply the obverse side of the same coin on which the Soviets were on the reverse side. Repeat, no exceptionalism, no driving concern for the people of Egypt or Iraq or Saudi Arabia or anywhere else in the region.
I don’t reject the idea that at certain times our posture in the world requires limited term deals with unsavory regimes. I may not applaud such deals but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. But, my point is that our foreign policy shouldn’t be constructed in such a way that we look on such alliances favorably. They should always be regrettable, and we should always be working to end them as quickly and as painlessly as possible. But we don’t do that, in part because we are selfish, and in part because our governmental leaders just don’t care that much about those ideals our contry was founded on. they’re more concerned with their own ambition, (Apropos of my point, FEMA head Michael Brown is the perfect metaphor for the self-indulgent attitude that drives ourpolicy. He was more concerned with his attire and getting a dogsitter than he was about the hurricane, according to emails.)
I am not one of those people who advocates the forceful spreading of Democracy. Nothing against Democracy, and I actually wish there were more functioning democracies, especially here at home, but I don’t believe democracy is necessarily the proper form of government at all times in all places. And as far as I’m concerned, democracy by itself is no guarantor of freedom or human rights. It can be, but it is the principles upon which a democracy is founded upon and organized around that make such freedoms and rights possible and this is something that cannot be exported in a militant aggressive fashion.
I hardly think that if we had united with a host of other countries to intervene and stop the genocide in Rwanda that that would have been seen as an example of us trying to impose our beliefs on others, except to the extent that stopping mass murder is a belief we share with most of the rest of the world.
As for the various despots we’ve supported around the world, what little we may have gained from them short term has been more or less neutralized by the problems we’ve had later. One could argue that this is not true of the oil producing dictatorships in the Middle East, but I submit the jury is stil out on that verdict. I think perhaps the greates tragedy for the Middle East, even greater than the British led occupation and realignment of the region has been the discovery of the huge petroleum reserves there. this vast and effortlessly acquired wealth made societal growth and evolution virtually unnecessary and created a situation where the industrial powers made dealswith the devil that virtually ensured the region would remain an archaic artifact in a sea of modernity. the other tragedy is that the huge oil reserves so mesmerized the west that we, in the grip of delusion, just sort of assumed that this oil would never run out and so became conditioned to forestall R&D into developing alternatives to this fissil fuel in a timely manner. So, for me, the question of whether we have truly benefitted by our alliances with dictators in the MidEast remains unanswered. One could argue that if we had refused to support these dictators, maybe we would have had more incentive, more need to develop the alternate energy systems we needed, and we ight be farther ahead of the game today. (Pointless speculation, perhaps, but the point I want to make is that it’s not necessarily clear how or how much we may have benefitted with regimes whose behavior was at odds with our own country’s founding principles.)
In my haste I forgot this one thing addressing your first point that;
I disagree. If our foreign policy is presented as being based on the concepts of mutual respect and common interest, shared responsibilities and benefits; if it is presented as something that does not enshrine the idea of some benefitting at the expense of others but rather elevates the idea that combined efforts lift everyone, then such policies that demonstrated these ideals would be well received and there’d be no cause for accusations of colonialism or imperial designs or the condescending pomposity associated with those who would bring civilization to the heathens.
Sadly, our policies, both domestic and foreign, have increasingly less to do with the kind of equality such policies would have to recogize. But it could be done, but not as long as we cling to the “exceptionalism” meme. What we might accomplish with such a foreign policy foundation could very well be exceptional, but just as a person who declaims his own wisdom in so doing proves that he doesn’t have it,so too for us to claim exceptionalism is evidence that we don’t yet understand the world in which we live.
I don’t take well to being called “naive”, but you have carried on my side of the converstation quite well — thanks!
…discussion, and I apologize for not having the time right now for a long, nuanced discussion. But just one more point:
Bush is learning that there is a reason why we tolerated some of the autocrats in the region.
Saddam being a major case in point, we did far more than tolerate them.
“We have become what we set out to vanquish.”
It would appear so BooMan. Maybe GW didn’t take History when he was a student at Yale.
Well, I’ve been telling people for years this country is becoming more and more like the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. We still have a little way to go before we can add ourselves to that notorious list, but we are getting there faster than even I could have believed.
But the only thing that surprises me about the prisons in Eastern Europe is the lack of original thinking on the part of the CIA…
I’ve always obsessed with questions like, “How did the Germans, Russians, etc. let things get so out of control? Why did they accept what was being done in their country?” Germans aren’t more evil than us, nor are Russians. And I’ve always held the belief that what happened under Stalin or Hitler could happen anywhere. No country, no people are immune to this fate. With the right combination of desperation, fear, apathy and corruption, any nation can become an evil empire.
I have to say, I was raised by a free-spirit hippie mom who never got over losing her friends in Viet-Nam, the back alley abortion she had to get, or that fact that her Cherokee ancestors were massacred. I was pretty much raised to not trust the government, to not buy into the Land of the free and home of the brave stuff.
But even I am feeling just like you each day. I didn’t have many warm fuzzy feelings for this place to begin with, but this is not the country I’ve always known. It is extremely disorienting trying to gain any perspective on our present situation while history unfolds. Was it always bad and we only now have the ability to see it? Or is this something altogether different, an abberation? Intellectually, I could easily argue the former. But my gut tells me it is the latter.
Anyway, what I was going to say was that now I know what must have been going through the minds of all those Russians and Germans… Confusion, disbelief, helplessness, fear … the basic inability to comprehend the reality of the history taking place before their eyes. And the need to continue on with their lives, feed the kids, go to work, maintain relationships, trying to maintain as much normalcy as possible.
This really hit home for me, and the fear seems to make some people accept the atrocities meekly. Some people I talk to that defend torture seem to be saying, beneath their words, torture only happens to bad people so if they are tortured they must be evil and deserve it and since I’m a good person I’m safe from torture, please tell me I’m safe, I’ll be good, my kids will be good, and so on and on…
which is what torture is for, isn’t it? To scare people, keep them in line?
It is so that not only every man, woman and child in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Poland, Romania, France, Pakistan, every county in the world will know that they can be seized and hauled off for “interrogation” by the Americans at any time, but also so that every American man, woman, and child will know that they, too, could be suspected of being a “security risk.”
The purpose of torture is not only to provide “stress relief” for the “troops,” but to terrorize all those outside the “facility,” as they wait quietly, hoping their child’s name will not be called.
Fear is the single most powerful weapon in the arsenals of tyranny. And wherever fear is propagated by the government, the psychological autonomyof the populace is compromised and tyranny gets “a leg up” on it’s march toward self-glorification.
This will be the legacy of the Bush regime; a bunch of insane megalomaniacs who finally got their shot at dominating the world and failed miserably to do so while creating death and destruction with every action they took. Cheney and company no longer have the ability to recognize reality that exists beyond the realm of their own delusional ideology. Even if they wanted to, they’re incapable of doing the right thing because what would be right and just will forever more be invisible to their damaged, irretrievable psyches.
We need to start a massive letter writing campaign. We need to point out that there have been a lot of false alarms and we think its because our scum sucking administration has approved and encouraged the torturing detainees. We need to show the administration and the world that we find this repulsive and counter productive. I’m going to write my representatives. If I don’t then I’m guilty too.
I’m not used to being referred to as naive, and those who know me, especially those with whom I disagree, would probably laugh at such a suggestion. And of course I’m not known for putting up strawmen to support my arguments.
The Soviet Union and the American Union were two sides of the same ugly and destructive coin. this isnot to say that US style government and society wasas bad as the soviet model, but rather to make the point that there was a symbiotic relationship between these two powers that wrought significant destruction across the globe.
And it was far less a battle of ideologies between these two as it was a naked power struggle. The powers that be in both countries became fabulously wealthy as a result of the cold war. the military-industrial complexes of both entities were as corrupt and greedy as could be, and it was they, (Eisenhower in his wisdom warned us about this exact thing), who commandeered the reins ofpower in the respective governments in order to propagandize the masses by demonizing the enemy in order to justify grabbing all that money for the arms race.
Demonizing the Soviets back in the day was actually quite similar to the demonization of the Iraq regime under Saddam. The rubric was the same in that one instills disproportionate fear in the populace as a means of getting them to support aggression as a method of self-defense.
The idea that the battle between the Soviets and the Americans was about ideology as as hollow as is the argument that the conflict between the US and the terrorist elements in the Middle East is about religious ideology. simply a ludicrous suggestion.
I’m late to the party, but I have to agree with S2, sbj, Ductape, and the others who argue that BooMan’s critique doesn’t go far enough.
Here’s a metaphor: the rich kid, heir to his father’s corporate empire, discovers that the business has a few bodies in the basement and has to continue some pretty ugly practices to maintain its place in the economic order. If he continues these practices, he cedes any moral authority to object to them. But if he objects to them and then, once in power, puts a stop to them, and makes amends as best he can for the bodies in the basement, he may be flushing his inheritance down the toilet.
And I say, flush away. I want nothing to do with that shit. No thank you. Fuck the trust fund.
And I think the Americans I admire most–Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others of that ilk, would agree with me.
The ideals have nothing to do with empire, and won’t be lost when the empire crumbles. On the contrary, the ideals are lost when the empire flourishes.