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We cannot countenance global bullying, or sign on to every mad adventure dreamed up in the bunkers of Virginia, in the pathetic hope of getting a break on softwood-lumber exports.

We know that when U.S. governments seek to arbitrate global morality, they often get it wrong. (Saddam Hussein, circa 1982.) We're within our rights to be alarmed at plans for giant computer systems to snoop through our travel and credit-card records. What on Earth is anti-American about that?

We celebrate the best of America's history and culture. We thank Americans for their vast contributions to the cause of freedom and humanity. We will go to our graves haunted by Sept. 11, 2001, and determined to help prevent a repeat.

And as we've done so many times before, we watch in sorrow as misguided rulers in Washington undermine what is great about America. Thankfully, in the past, this has been corrected in due course by Americans themselves.

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It ended with what sounded like a call to revolution, drawn straight from the U.S. Declaration of Independence. If the "attitudes" of the federal government threaten our ties with the United States, CanWest said, "it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish such government."

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Nothing is more American than questioning the actions of military and political leaders. Some of the most eloquent critics of America's global pretensions are to be found in the United States itself.

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Or if you take minigun's tack, they're all haters and "pussies" from Harvard. Or equivalent to (insert despotic dictator here) because if you don't want to overthrow governments of countries other than your own, or think it causes more problems than it helps, you're of the above category.

Just rest assured that there are plenty of Americans (like, erm, myself and other US posters on babble) and plenty of "critics" who exist in the US, just again, you don't hear too much about them because it isn't what sells or what the international image has to be.

But there is also a huge movement out to quash that dissent (probably better funded, if much less numerous, than the dissenters).

For that reason, I doubt you'll see much dissent on TV, or in USA Today.

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But there is also a huge movement out to quash that dissent (probably better funded, if much less numerous, than the dissenters).

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Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Chomsky, have focused on what is seen as American military aggression against the rest of the world, for this aggression is understood as having its “root cause” in America’s systematic exploitation of the remainder of the human race. If American exploitation did not create misery, it would not need to use military force. It is the global immiserization thesis that makes the use of force an indispensable tool of American foreign policy and that is responsible, according to this view, for turning America into a terrorist state. This explains the absolute centrality of the global immiserization thesis in the creation of the specter of America now haunting so much of our world.

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But this condition, let us recall, is precisely the opposite of the objective political conditions that, according to Marx, must be present in order for capitalism to be overthrown. For classical Marxism demands, quite realistically, a state that is literally being torn apart by internal dissension. Revolution, in short, requires a full-fledged civil war within the capitalist social order itself, since nothing short of this can possibly achieve the goal that the revolution is seeking. Hence, 9-11-style attacks that serve only to strengthen the already considerable solidarity between classes in the United States are, from the perspective of classical Marxism, fatally flawed. For such attacks not only fail to further any revolutionary aims; they actually make the revolution less probable. A society of 300 million individuals whose bumper stickers say “United We Stand” is not a breeding ground for revolutionary activity. Nor is it a society that can be easily intimidated into mending its ways, even if we make the assumption that its ways need mending.

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The left, if it is not to condemn itself to become a fantasy ideology, must reconcile itself not only with the reality of America, but with its dialectical necessity — America is the sine qua non of any future progress that mankind can make, no matter what direction that progress may take.

The belief that mankind’s progress, by any conceivable standard of measurement recognized by Karl Marx, could be achieved through the destruction or even decline of American power is a dangerous delusion. Respect for the deep structural laws that govern the historical process — whatever these laws may be — must dictate a proportionate respect for any social order that has achieved the degree of stability and prosperity the United States has achieved and has been signally decisive in permitting other nations around the world to achieve as well. To ignore these facts in favor of surreal ideals and utterly utopian fantasies is a sign not merely of intellectual bankruptcy, but of a disturbing moral immaturity. For nothing indicates a failure to understand the nature of a moral principle better than to believe that it is capable of enforcing itself.
It is not. It requires an entire social order to shelter and protect it. And if it cannot find these, it will perish.

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PS: The Brits like Americans, the Germans don’t get it, and there may be a falling-out in the family.

[ December 06, 2002: Message edited by: SHH ]

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It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.

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[ December 14, 2002: Message edited by: SHH ]

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We celebrate the best of America's history and culture.

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Uhhh... Could someone Explain what and where is American Culture?

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Uhhh... Could someone Explain what and where is American Culture?

It doesn't Exist...

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And we have Britney Spears. Is that not Cultuuure?