ChrisE said:
I really should mix in some emoticons when I'm being sarcastic. Got Alpe and rhub all worked up over that boilerplate demagoguery from the "real Americans".
rhub, as usual you are off in utopia land. There will always be a vacuum in the world to be filled by a dominant country. Mankind will always look to become dominant over eachother; it is human nature. Your wishful world view is nothing but folly.
We can criticize the US all we want but the fact remains the world would be in just as much chaos if the US had not done anything you list. I realize this, but I don't think you do. So, maybe you honestly should ask yourself if the world would be one big happy family if the US didn't exist.
I do agree 911 should have been a wakeup call for reflection of our foreign policy. I do agree human rights within the US has taken a hit and Obama governs 180 from all the righteous talk he made during the campaign. I agree the US is not evenhanded in our foreign policy, but maybe that is the way it has to be because I don't trust the intentions of some other nations.
The fact is that so many of the problems the US faces today, but also those of the world, were begotten by its own prepotency and thus our only salvation, and therefore that of the democratic State itself, is to act with an integrity becoming of the human and civic rights and self-proclaimed high moral position we claim to vaunt, and that we constantly use as a leverage against the so called rogue States to condem their crimes, while acting no better ourselves. In other words our example should be consitent with that which we preach from the international pupit. To do this we must be ruthlessy critical, without the psrejudice that is often the product of an access to patriotic sentimentality and from a rigorously objective point of view, and even if we are to deserve the liberites which our democratic civilization has bestowed upon us.
To present a thesis that is exclusively fabricated upon a purely instrumental historical argumentation, by contrast, is to merely seek to be let off the hook from one's multiple crimes and to cater, in the basest of fashions, to one's ideological position while in the most intellectually lazy and self-serving of ways.
Personally I prefer chaos to a hypocritical superpower that only acts to preserve its own interests and economic prosperity, no matter at what costs either to its so called ideals, or to those who have been subjected to and brutalized by its prepotency, where the law of the mighty prevails over real justice. We should not fear chaos so much as we should fear the ghastly violence that has been caused by a purely instrumental use of power. Especially when it breaks the law, and thus
is itself chaotic, and trounces upon everything decent that has come about socially and politically since the inception of the Democratic State, not only in America, but throughout the so called free world. Plus
chaos is infinitely more stimulating.
The worst governments, of course, are the fundamentalist religious regimes we see today in the Middle East and, increasingly, among the African and South Asian countries. However the horrible foreign policies of the US and the other democratic nations of the West in these regions, has in large measure been responsible for planting the seeds that have given life to them.
We should as honest and objective intellects, even before being honest and objective citizens, be asking ourselves how many citizens have been killed by terrorist attacks compared to how many citizens, equally innocent, but simply and unfortunately behind enemy lines, have succomed and were dismembered by US war bombs? Or how many undemocratic and dictatorial regimes have been supported, when not outright sustained, by our governments, when economic and strategic expediency had seemed to impose such actions by a most cynical and intollerant political leadership without compunction nor remorse, regardless of the monstrous consequences such policy may have caused for millions? At the same time and by this token, we should be asking how many rightous political leaders have been assassinated either with compliance, or logistical help, when not actual mandates and supplies were sent, to satisfy the prevailing political thinking at the time, but again with disastrous consequences for millions upon millions of lives, from Mossadeq, to Salvator Allende and Bishop Rumero to provide only the most cursory of short-lists?
The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable. Though usually what we get is an art of mediocracy and mental laziness. To call in an acusatory tone, rational and objective criticism, is to send the idea that was once the democratic State straight to the grave. To annihilate freedom and to demolish progressive social thought, and thus to preach to the side of intollerance and to, therefore, assume the grotesque appearance
of the intollerant, the fanatically narrow minded and, ultimately, the repressive.
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