American Moral superiority?

“The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others,” declared President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech. Such a bald assertion of American arrogance is not surprising, coming from a man whose worldview has been termed “messianic militarism.” But this was one of Bush’s biggest applause lines, which I find discouraging. Can we voice a more attractive alternative to this jingoistic patriotism?

It has long been a conceit of North Americans that we operate on a moral plane above the rest of humankind. But in the transnational era, the rest of the world lives within us, and we live within the rest of the world. There is no escape from our inter-relatedness. But neither is there an escape, apparently, from the dangerous combination of “messianic fervor” and imperial ambition which drives those who hold the reins of power in the United States at this moment.

Acting on the belief that there are two sides to every story, at least, and that the United States does not possess the sole truth about world affairs, I have been listening to what foreign voices have been saying about the land of the free and the home of the brave. Contrary to what the Bush administration preaches, true patriotism, and national security, require more than ever that North Americans learn to see at least a partial truth in views of reality that conflict with our own.

The U.S. has “entered one of its periods of historical madness,” writes novelist John Le Carré. The current national hysteria is “worse than McCarthyism,” he believes, and “potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.” Like most foreigners who admire American culture and political ideals, Le Carré is convinced that most Americans who support an invasion of Iraq are “thoroughly decent and humane people.” But they operate in a vacuum. Half of Americans now believe, it seems, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. The view on the world available to most U.S. citizens, as framed by the administration through corporate media, is an ideologically constricted and self-referential peephole. So it is unlikey that most Americans would even hear about the poll in Time’s January 2003 European edition, in which 84% of its respondents saw the United States as the greatest threat to world peace. Most who do hear snatches of world opinion will become defensive about “why the world hates us.”

The danger of this nation’s course is that we suffer from collective myopia: “a defective vision of distant objects; a lack of foresight.” We absorb this myopia from the media, for whom the “distant objects” of foreign nations are seldom in focus. The American deaths in any disaster are counted first, leaving an implicit assumption that American lives are of higher value. We tend to see ourselves as innocent victims, to over-estimate our own suffering vis-a-vis the rest of the world, and to assume the victim’s entitlement to vengeance, or at least moral authority.

Now we have a president who amplifies the worst of our myopia. Who will speak truth to power? Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela felt compelled to say, on January 30, that Bush “has no foresight and cannot think properly.” Meaning? Presumably, that Bush and his team are “using theological language to justify empire,” as Chalmers Johnson says. Their foreign policy serves both the Regime of Oil and a fundamentalist Christian God who has chosen Americans as his global cop and savior. Bush’s instincts about world affairs, which Bob Woodward calls “his second religion,” are informed by right-wing Christian fantasies about a Rapture arising out of an Armageddon during End Times. (The remaining Jews, in this post-apocalyptic vision, will convert to Christianity). Bush is surrounded by ideologues who share his combustible mixture of militarism, messianic zeal, and machismo. And being in possession of the truth, Bush doesn’t “feel like I owe anybody an explanation,” as he told Woodward. Small wonder, then, that Gunter Grass, the German Nobel Prize winner in literature, describes Bush as “the perfect expression of this common danger we face.”

A favorite tactic of American hawks is to remind the wimpy Europeans that it was American blood that “saved” them in two World Wars, as well as the Cold War. 292,000 Americans lost their lives in the Pacific and European Theatres combined, but in truth, this was surpassed by the loss of life in Poland or Romania alone during WWII. Our sacrifice is dwarfed by that of Europeans collectively, who lost 13 million soldiers and 25 million civilians. Russians claim that it was they who brought the Nazis to their knees, and they have long held a grievance against Americans for not recognizing their tremendous sacrifice. The British argue that they, not the U.S., “stood between the Nazis and the takeover of all Europe.”

58,000 American soldiers died in Vietnam, which traumatized us for two generations. But the Vietnamese lost two million people—10% of their population. We claimed they placed a lower value on human life, thereby making the senseless slaughter more acceptable. Much of American foreign policy still flows from our humiliation in Vietnam. The “we’re number one” breast-beating of the Reagan era was clearly compensation. And Bush Senior’s testy desire for a “statute of limitiations” regarding Vietnam was apparently another way of saying that we should be free to engage in more wrong-headed imperial ventures.

Now America’s hawks want the rest of the world to pay for the trauma of 9/11. In typical American fashion, we have commercialized this to the point of nausea, and turned it into a political weapon. Many outside the U.S. who bore the brunt of war and terror during the 20th century—too much of it instigated by the U.S.—hoped this tragedy would lead us to look for the true sources of terror. As Indian novelist Arundhati Roy put it, the world sympathized with our tragedy, but they also said to us, “in the gentlest, most human way: ‘Welcome to the World’.”

We don’t want to be welcomed to the world. We want to rule the world. The rest of the world recognizes clearly that America’s oil addiction is driving the Bush team’s march to war in Iraq, along with the aim to establish Israeli hegemony. But the Bush team cynically denies its interest in the world’s second largest oil reserves. After a year of network TV silence on the topic, in December 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said with a straight face on 60 Minutes that the war had “absolutely nothing to do with oil.” In late January, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Rockwell Schnabel, claimed in Brussels that “this has nothing to do with oil.” Meanwhile Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that Iraq’s oil fields would be “held in trust for the Iraqi people.” And the Regime of Oil floated a trial balloon about paying for the invasion with Iraqi oil; then showed its true colors by voicing its fears that Saddam would torch his oil fields.

“While most Americans think that we are planning an attack on Iraq to save the world from a madman,” wrote Jeremy Rifkin, “most Europeans think that Bush is the madman, with the evil intention of grabbing a foothold in the oil-rich Middle East to extend the American empire.” Haven’t Europeans shed enough blood that Americans should take their opinions about war seriously? The Bush team ritually describes Saddam as a Hitler, while some European and Asian opinion leaders also refer to Bush as a Hitler. Shouldn’t this do more than outrage us? Can we dismiss out of hand widespread concerns of Asians, Europeans, and Latin Americans about Bush’s “cowboyish” politics? Can we afford to dismiss the criticism that “the lessons of Vietnam seem to have been lost on America”?

The religious roots of America’s myopic arrogance were apparent to Martin Luther King Jr. “Don’t let anyone make you think that God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort of policeman of the whole world,” he thundered. King was slain a year after he uttered those words. Americans who would today question their nation’s sense of entitlement, and messianic delusions, find it almost impossible to get a hearing. Meanwhile, as our leaders proclaim American pre-eminence, a disturbing number of people around the world are coming to think of the American government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” as King said, or even “the great enemy of the human race,” as Che Guevara said in 1967.

First, this is my first posting. I've read the guidelines and been lurking here for sometime. I do not think this post violates any written rules, but if I have violated un-written protocal then please delete this post! Also, sorry for the length.

I am a studiously annonymous political employee of a die-hard Republican partisan. Let me just say that I love this site.

I found this discussion elsewhere (on a very scary radical liberal forum disgused as innocent parental chatter) and wanted to hear your thoughts, especially in regards to this reply:

http://www.theparentperspective.com/boards/thread-view.asp?threadid=155482&MessageID=1108862#1108862

This article was well written and persuasive. However, the author based his views on faulty historical logic and judgemental conclusions. We are all subject to our pre-concieved notions. Here is my response, given with a measure of pre-concieved support for the administration, but also a rich background in international politics and the art of persuasive writing.

Firstly, to think that an American President, of either party, would rise before the assembled leaders of the three distinct branches of the most powerful nation on Earth and say anything but "We control our distiny" is an exercise in foolish fairy tales completely unrelated to the real world of international and national events. He did not, I'd like to further point out, say that "We aren't going to listen to what anyone else says and all we care about is our way, our time." He stated, "No one will DECIDE (emphasis mine).." Asking a democratic body to give up decision making powers is like asking an infant to give up eating.

The author of this piece goes on to state that Americans, no North Americans, are under the impresison that they are on a moral plane above the rest of the world. I wasn't aware of this common misconception extending to the citizens of Canada and Mexico, but let us set that aside for the time being. The gut reaction of a contrarian is to shout "hea no we don't think that!", but in fact, there are those of us who do believe that Americans are, at least in some small part, morally superior. Is it a correct feeling? Probably not on a personal level. I'm a great believer in all men being created equal and all of us inheirting original sin as well. Morally I'd say persons in India are on the same plane as those in America. The difference however is in collective moral superiority. This "feeling" that we as Americans have the right to scold the rest of the world like naughty school children rises from the dark times of the distant and more recent past. Decry imperialism and commercialism all you like, but it is undisputed that the American nation "made the world safe for democracy" in 1918 and brought down the original "axis of evil" in the 1940's. Triumphing over a regime that starved, tortured, deprived and generally misued it's citizens for 80 years while meanwhile terrorizing the world with it's destructive power didn't hurt the "king of the mountain" feeling either.

Now, did America do all of this alone? Goodness no. And the right minded, level headed thinkers of our nation and other realize that and embrace the contributions of others. The heroic struggle of the Chinese, Russian and British people (to name but a few) contributed in no small part to the outcome of the last century. We did not go alone and our glorification of the great deeds of the war dead should in no way lesson the respect for the heroes of other nations. But America was the turning force, the foci of change.

Change, the ability to peacefully, for 216 years, change the reigns of power and the direction of the country. Change, the ability to commit great and horrible wrongs and then realize and amend those wrongs, without reactionary retribution. It is this ability to change, to look within, to reform and amend, that makes the collective of a democratic republic morally superior to that of a dictatorship. If America were truly myopic it would be a scattering of small regionalized states cluttering the continent. It is precisley the lack of myopia, the manifest destiny of change, momentum, progress that has made America.

Periods of "historic madness", Msr. Le Carre, should also include the reactionary isolationism of the 1920's and the self-absorbed introspection of the 1930's. It has been said so much as to be cliche, but the weight of the argument still holds. Should America ever forget the price of non-interaction and approval through inaction? Let no one be misled to think that I compare Saddam to Hitler. Hitler convinced thousands to follow willingly and worship blindly. Saddam simple eliminated all those who chose to not follow. A difference of tactics that created a world threat as opposed to a regionalized madman.

President Bush believes in God and his actions and statements, to whit "feel like I owe anybody an explanation", fly in the face of those who do not. Yet the man states what he believes in for all the world to see, and is still the greatly respected leader of the most powerful nation on Earth. The rightfully elected leader of a democratic republic. The President, of course, does answer to someone.. he answers to the people of his nation, and ultimately to the God he worships. And his actions and mannerisms indicate that his responsibility to those masters are paramount on his mind at all times.

We as America do not wish for the rest of the world to pay for 9/11. We did not declare a holy war against an entire religion. We did, though no one bothers to recall it, give the Taliban a chance to hand over the perpetrators of this infamous crime. They refused and showed themselves to be in league with mass murderers. The moral superiority of knowing that life is sacred to all mankind, in addition to great national anger, led this country to war in Afghanistan.

"Half of Americans now believe, it seems, that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center." If this quote illustrates the ability of Americans to be swayed by sound bites then what should we say for the rest of the world? Let us not forget that a majority of Germans under the age of 30 believe the United States ochestrated the attacks. Both ideas are ridiculous in the extreme. The blame, if there be blame to lay, should not rest on the media or governmetns of either nation previously mentioned in this paragraph. If Americans choose to beleive that the blame for 9/11 rests on the shoulders of a man whom no fundamentalist Muslim would be caught dead with then the American people are to be blamed for not having the education and willingness to look beyond a nightly news cast. The same could be said for the Germans.

Why do we dismiss with glares and grumbles claims of "cowboy tactics" and "imperialisim"? Mayhap because those claims touch at the root of the national sense of self and raise the ironic eyebrow of the collective nation. To be lectured about the dangers of imperialism from any nation in Europe is ridiculous. They know the dangers right enough, yet has a single one applied this Yoda-like wisdom to their own nation? "Do as we say, not as we've done" never works. As to "cowboy" politics, this statement has always amused me. I admit to a level of fascination with the international contempt for cowboys. Here were men who worked all day with little pay beyond food and a horse, never bothered anyone who didn't bother them and by and large lived out very boring and peaceful lives. Even the Hollywod cowboy was a relutctant hero, slow to anger, but always swayed by the love of a good woman and belief in God. Italians love cowboys, why can't the rest of the world?

We do not wish to rule the world. We wish to live in peace, without nightly being regaled with tales of horror from other countries. We wish for all men to live as equals in opportunity and for culture and freedom to thrive. We elect people who think the same thing. For all the anger and ire over partisian politics, when it comes to the core beliefs of freedom, liberty, equality, we are all in fact of the same party. Why does the world hate us? I'd venture to say that individually few actually bother to hate America. Collectively, I'd say it is a measure of jealousy tempered by the natural animal emotion of fear inspired by the strong over the weak. We can, after all, destroy the world with a twitch of our fingers. That is why the world fears, maybe hates, and definitely tries to guide us. What galls the world is when we say "Yes thank you, but we've chatted about it and we thing you are wrong."

Thank you world, but we've chatted about this and we think you are wrong. But thanks for your opinions. We, after all, actually advocate the free interchange of ideas.

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