Posted on 06/14/2003 9:01:43 AM PDT by Mister Magoo
The above belies the author's limited understanding of his subject. Like many of his persuasion he assumes re-arranging his prejudices is a form of thinking. It is not.
In other words, when they needed the US to save their asses from communist rule, they were fine in accepting US help and US soldiers dying on their behalf. Now, they would rather us gone.
The collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the only superpower. The sudden emergence of a ruthless, antagonistic flaunting of US power is hard to understand, all the more so since it fits neither with long-tested imperial policies nor the interests of the US economy. But patently a public assertion of global supremacy by military force is what is in the minds of the people at present dominating policymaking in Washington.
The projection of US military power is the single thing responsible for maintaining a level of peace in the world.
Within ten years, I fully expect that the US will again have to come to the aid of Europe to protect it from Islamic terrorism from within it's fast growing Muslim population. Americans will again sacrifice their lives in support of an ungrateful European Union.
And this from people who routinely assert that the United Nations be allowed to redistribute the wealth of the planet, try anyone in any country, and assert military power in the name of "human rights."
One suspects that the real problem with the United States isn't imperialism but competition.
Eric Hobsbawm is no doubt intelligent and industrious, and he might well have made a notable contribution as a historian. Unfortunately, lifelong devotion to Communism destroyed him as a thinker or interpreter of events. Such original work as he did concerned bandits and outlaws. But even here there is bias, for he rescued them from obscurity not for their own sake but as precursors of Communist revolution. His longer and later books are constructed around the abstractions of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat and the supposedly pre-ordained class struggle between them, capital and capitalism, empire and imperialism—in short the Marxist organizing principles which reduce human beings and their varied lives to concepts handy to serve a thesis worked up in advance and in the library. This material, needless to say, was derived from secondary sources.The purpose of all Hobsbawm’s writing, indeed of his life, has been to certify the inevitable triumph of Communism. In the face of whatever might actually have been happening in the Soviet Union and its satellites, he devised reasons to justify or excuse the Communist Party right to its end—long after Russians themselves had realized that Communism had ruined morally and materially everybody and everything within its reach. He loves to describe himself as a professional historian, but someone who has steadily corrupted knowledge into propaganda, and scorns the concept of objective truth, is nothing of the kind, neither a historian nor professional.
Continued...
May God have mercy on his soul when they meet face to face.
Ah, but we are.
We've been working towards it for 200 years. We've been closing in on it for the past 50 years.
And now we do control the world from Wall Street to the hardware in the sky.
Thank God.
However, they are intensely interested in preserving liberty and justice for all within the United States. Americans don't give a hoot what people of other lands believe or what their customs are--other than a healthy curiosity, and they have no interest in interfering with them.. They believe passionately in tolerance, and they are a very tolerant people.
On September 11, 2001, the United States was attacked by dangerous fanatics whose proclaimed ambition is world domination, the destruction of the United States and the other Western democracies, and the establishment of a world-wide Islamic theocracy with the Koran as the only constitution and the shariah as international law. These fanatics have the overt and covert support of a number of foreign governments and many of their people, who share the ambition.
America's consequent military response is purely defensive in reaction to this threat.
It is in the interest of the governments and the people of the Free World to assist the United States in stopping this threat and preventing these fanatics from fulfilling their ambition.
The situation is a repeat of the threat posed by The Third Reich in the 20th century, and the parallels are striking. Those who threaten freedom and free people must be stopped. Apeasement will not work.
Americans deserve--and need--the support of the people of the world.
People who think like the author of this article are the enablers of tyrrany, whether they realize it or not. They would be wise to reassess their thinking.
The entire world is under serious threat, and the Americans need all the help they can get.
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