Re: [pf] What lies behind American arrogance?

At 08:30 22/1/2001 -0800, Tom Wheeler sent-on:
>http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/200101220018.htm
>
>.. the US .. has vital national interests everywhere, but is untouched by
eventualities anywhere. It is involved everywhere, but is ultimately
unanswerable, unaccountable and unconcerned about the consequences to
anyone except US citizens. The political logic of American engagement is
simple: the rest of the world is not worth one American body bag.
>   Like a black hole, the US sucks in most of the energy of the planet.
Americans consume more than half the world's goods and services; they spend
more than $17bn annually on pet food alone, $4bn more than is needed to
provide basic health and nutrition for the world's entire human population;
and $8bn annually on cosmetics, $2bn more than is needed to provide basic
education worldwide.
>.. Americana is a successor to westernisation. The purpose of
westernisation, the dominant theme of the second half of the 20th century,
was to transform the world into the image of the west. But whereas
westernisation was like a bacterium that could be fought with the
antibodies of tradition, Americana is like a virus that has no cure. It
attacks the immune system not just of the US itself, but all the rest of us.
>
>The ideology of Americana has three simple and completely simplistic
tenets. The first is the notion that America is the world, so the world had
better shape up and be more like America. This dumb certitude ..
>The second canon of Americana reduces all histories, of all the peoples in
the world, to American history. As the home of popular culture, America has
become the world's storyteller. .. it is genuine and deep ideological
correctness. To be worth telling, and therefore worth knowing, stories must
be rooted in American experience. So, in the recently released film U-571,
we discover that the capture of the Enigma code machine, which played an
important part in thwarting Hitler, was actually the work of Americans. ..
>

· My wife's father, Geoffrey Timms, was one of the three "boffins" who
provided a major part of the mathematical background and analysis at
Bletchley Park, southern England, where breaking the Enigma code was
actually done, using what Geoff would have called the world's first
electronic valve computer. Currently Bera is involved in bringing a copy of
a recently-declassified report on all this, here to New Zealand.

· I really object to typical US distortions and sometimes outright lies.


>.. the third basic precept of Americana: the total innocence and
righteousness of America. White Americans, we are to understand, are simple
people struggling to make a good life by taming the wild frontier -
whatever or wherever it may be. Simple innocence .. is the basis for the
Americans' devout belief in their own essential goodness. This belief was
there from the country's inception.
> America was the first settler colony, established against and through the
denial of the country's original inhabitants. .. A John Wayne or Shane does
what a man's got to do - which includes genocidal violence and ecological
destruction - on behalf of innocence, to protect the poor, honest and
humble settlers. When the nasty work is done, the lone hero figure rides
off into the sunset, leaving the tamed and safe land to be administered by
the simple, homespun, righteous ethic of the settlers. Innocence, the
assurance of rightness no matter what, is the bedrock of American foreign
policy. Just as the destruction and appalling treatment of the land's
original inhabitants, as well as slavery and segregation, are subsumed in
the ethos of innocence, so the unparalleled suffering that American
imperial might has inflicted on the unfortunate of the earth has been
absorbed in the presumption of its planetary moral superiority. 
 ...


· Thank you very much, Tom, for sending this to PF.

David.
(David MacClement) davd@ihug.co.nz 
http://www.geocities.com/davdd.geo/index.html#top
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