As regular visitors to Anticant's Arena and the Burrow will know, Anticant is dedicated to the simple proposition that in a tolerable society worth defending, dissent and the freedom to criticise your country's government and its policies are core values which should be sacrosanct.
This is not universally the case, however, in the United States, where the still numerous neo-Con supporters of the Bush Administration appear to assume that anyone who questions the President's wisdom and the purity of his motives is a traitor and 'un-American' [a phrase with a chillingly McCarthyite echo]. A particularly glaring example of this cast of mind is to be found here.
Such extreme unreflecting 'patriotism', which is often accompanied by withering disdain and contempt for foreigners who disagree with US policies and behaviour in an increasingly dangerous world, puts those of us who regard the USA as a great but increasingly flawed nation into the uncomfortable position of having to be the 'candid friend'.
It is high time that these 'patriotic' Americans woke up to the fact that much of the criticism is justified, and that a revision of their attitudes and conduct is overdue if they don't want 'God's Own Country' to become the pariah of the 21st century.
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9 comments:
Perhaps the maxim that every action begets a reaction is proved by this article.
It seems there's a shy reaction in the US if we believe it.
HERE Is an example of a certain american nationalism, something that came in as a comment at one of my weblogs, 11 Aug 2007
kingstryker:
You people really don’t know a thing about it, do you? And I’m not interested in some long conversation or insults so here’s the deal. This is the way it is. They whoever they are, outnumber us badly and it’s a fight to the death now right to the end to keep our way of life and all we have. Constitutions are bullshit. Anybody is free to have anything he wants and now it’s the time where we all have to fight together to keep it that way. I’m sorry if you aren’t American, but I’m not sorry enough about it not to kill you if you get in everybody’s face with suicide bombs and old religious bullshit. That world is dead and it died off long ago. The American soldier’s job is to make you dead too if you keep it up, and keep killing off your own kind. What kind of people do things like that? People that aren’t fit to live, I’m sorry. I’m also sorry but I’ve seen some of it and if you weren’t born American, it is already too late for you. Things run out, oil, water, air, what do you think should happen? Don’t tell me about it, I already know. Just think hard about what I said to yourselves. Paste it ON!
Perhaps this beast should see where his family has come from. What makes him believe being American is paramount?
ARGUABLY, 'Americanism' will do -- that is the term for a body of notions that have percolated in the american psyche since about the days of Theodore Roosevelt, around which time I believe the term may have been coined. It is optimistic on the face of it, and benevolent as far as that goes; but, it /is/ emotive and, hence, essentially manipulative; and, originally at least, doubtlessly was directed by the pressmen against the first-generation offspring of foreigners, as well as the less-gifted among the rural Celto-Americans. Its chief provenance among the Anglo-Saxon classes was, as I have said, in their use of it in their newspapers, to bamboozle clowns and self-conscious persons of recent non-North European extraction. It is therefore entirely-inapposite, now, that the current motley of central-european jewish Zionists of the Wolfowitz-Perle class should no doubt be dragging the concept around like a dead cat; and, that in order to bamboozle the largely-rural Celto- and semi-legal Mex-Americans into joining the Army; which last now is being avoided by even the american Negroes.
Sorry...'entirely not-inapposite' was intended, /supra/.
/clown(s)/ is E, 18c, for a rural 'clod', or labourer.
'non-north european' as an /adjectival/ phrase had not to have been capitalised at all, at all; but, the prevailing /wrong/ usage in this respect is such that the the proper casing of first-letters throughout looks...funny!
THERE /Are/ several other wens & mars, but this will have to do for now -- ed.
'central-european', oddly, does /not/ look funny -- is this our anglophone ethnocentricity at play, here? Or may it not in fact work because, indeed, Central-Europeans so often /seem/, well, lower-case...hmm? After all, everything East of Liechtenstein /is/ Asia!
IT Was in a /similar/ fine spirit of american amity and, in fact, 'Americanism' that once-on-a-time I told one of these braying asses from Mississippi -- in my father's finest tones! -- that 'of course NONE of your diseased yelps about, aw, Mexicans means a thing to ME...as, aw, in Minnesota WE do quite, QUITE consider, um...aw, everything, EVERYTHING, South from Des Moines -- MEXICO!'
JESUS Christ -- THAT was a Hell of a fight in the South Street Saloon here in Old Mankato, in South Front Street, twenty-six years ago & I've still got the scar in my topknot where the dirty reb rubbish hit me with the beer bottle...I really /do/ detest those poor people, although I think actually it's that whole bundle of atrocious /accents/ of theirs that set my teeth on edge -- the Acadian, or 'Cajun', excepted. /Both/ the town-creoles and the country /patois/, to me, are 'way kewl' as my youngest would say!
Zionists, Emmett, seem to me the least adequate people to boost Americanism given their social politics in the Middle East, unless they have the intention of converting the US to Zionist-style Judaism.
But, yes, one can never know how far can a warped mind reach!
YOU Know, all of this & us -- and, /our/ whole human being at this epoch in the universe -- is just mentally ill, each and severally. Or, perhaps, 'symbolically and semantically sick' is the phrase? Each group hugs its wounds in order to farm reparations, later. We need to stand up to the idea that anyone's horrible history is, objectively, 'any more' horrible than anothers. C S Lewis said it best, about Evil -- it is, no matter how horrific the gross numbers, /experienced/ -- like death -- /by one individual at a time/. So, it is crass of me to hold up the World for free stuff & blood-money because something bad happened to my great-grandmother. /That/ is the understanding it is the goal of therapy to help the emotionally-distrait individual to attain -- no more blaming, but instead free & happy living, NOW. This is the same for us all, I perceive, and thus for ALL the victim-groups. But, it IS an un-Godly BIG order!
IN All of these families, everyone is an asshole because their folks was assholes before them, and thus & so on all the way back to the Year Zero -- it is the task, then, of education to convey the hope & TOOLS for me, to-day, to stand right up and say 'No!' to my family-drama, and that from hence forward I /am now/ 1) happy and 2) /now able/ to make it stick, in all places and all cases. And, no, I am not proposing a formula for obliviousness, but rather the moral power to make life all around better by (largely in silence!) amending myself first of all -- and, only then, sashaying out into the street all stuffed full of wise advice & jolly gossip, about not smoking & free love. Again, of course, a tall order...but, doable nevertheless!
'ALRIGHT, You Devils -- out of the farter & turn me in some press-ups, hup, hup, hup!'
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