Posted on 09/14/2002 5:55:04 AM PDT by spartagroup
Hey, a shout out to all my Euro bros and sistas -- that was a class act, the way you treated President Bush during his visit to your continent. I bet most of you Europeans are so proud of yourselves.
"We showed him," I'm sure many of you are guffawing to each other in whatever the local term is in your own language.
It must have infuriated many of you, though, to see President Bush slough off the street protests and political slights, cruising from country to country with a smile on his face.
"A president has to act as though he is not aware that Europe is a civilization in eclipse, surrendering its parliaments for a bureaucracy unaccountable to the people, rendering itself helpless before its enemies and abandoning itself to the shadows of history." Wesley Pruden, columnist and editor-in-chief, The Washington Times, May 28, 2002.
Aren't you folks at all concerned to see that Bush got along best, and has been getting along most famously, with Russian President Putin?
I mean, let's face it, guys ("guys" in the American sense, referring to men, women and the sundry other sexes that have been popping up across Europe lately), it isn't exactly as if you and your leaders have exhibited strategic sense in recent decades. Probably not any kind of sense, if truth be known, but I want to be polite here.
I know that you folks in the Old World view we Americans as savage and uncouth, an untamable threat with our overwhelming economic and military power and cowboy swagger. It’s just as obvious that you see yourselves as moral, complex and all-knowing, making no effort to hide the contempt you feel for us, but probably thinking we're too dumb to recognize it.
Europeans glory in now being anti-war, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and environmentally friendly to boot -- but friends, what counts is how you acted when you were powerful countries, not as you behave now, when you have become a backwater in the world.
I am directing this missive to all of my European cousins, from the United Kingdom and on across the Channel to the gentle citizens of France, Germany, Spain, Italy and other past powers of Western Europe, mais, je'n parle pas français, nicht Deutcher, tampoco español, entonces …
"Naturally, they’re [Europeans] particularly contemptuous of George W., who they think is a semiliterate cowboy who spends so much time figuring out the big words in his Spider-Man comic books that he can’t stay away through the Law & Order reruns once night falls." Ibid, Wesley Pruden.
Right now, we Americans see your citizens shrieking in the streets, holding their heads in holy horror (well, "holy" is the wrong word since Europeans don’t believe in anything anymore) over alleged American excesses, whether in the war against Muslim terrorists or in support of democratic Israel. It is just squeezing out of your unhealthy pores (too much fat in your diets still and way too little exercise -- funniest thing in the world for an American is to exercise in a French gym and watch the skinny little men in their too-tight shorts struggling to lift baby weights), how smug and superior you consider yourselves to be over the general run of Americans.
It doesn't matter!
Yes, we make mistakes, yes, we're a touch arrogant about our system, and yes, (head hung in shame) we did bring McDonald's restaurants to the world, yet we possess one major trump card that Europe never played during its centuries of ascendancy. A true insight into a nation's moral character can be seen from how it acted when it was predominant in the world, or at least in its region. It doesn't matter if five years, fifty years or five hundred years have passed since a nation’s power began to wane. National character doesn't change that fast, or it wouldn't be character, would it? So, let's stack up how Western Europe conducted itself during its epoch of greatest strength, versus how America is acting today in the world, when we are all powerful.
Do I even have to go on?
Well, let's just take the United Kingdom briefly. Dear Brits, what can we say good about your history? Not much. Consider the Jews and what you did to them over the centuries. You blamed the Jews for the Great Plague in the 14th Century and butchered them by the thousands. You periodically expelled them, slaughtered them, and forced them into ghettos. You let Hitler burn them by the millions rather than taking them in as refugees, and even after World War II, you hanged Jews for trying to escape Europe’s bloody avenues for what became Israel, when you ran Palestine. And now you think you have the right to lecture Israel on how to respond to homicide bombers who are targeting women and children?
Take slavery. It is you who introduced it into the New World. Then, we were stuck with it once we had the sense to kick you out, but failed to extinguish that vile practice you brought to us.
Take colonialism. Of course, this is the kiss of death to any moral argument you may try to mount against America.
When you were the world’s premier power, you used that energy to take over as much of the globe as possible, killing and enslaving all of the less developed people you could reach. You're still proud of that slogan: "The sun never sets on the British Empire." You were more successful at this than the other European powers of the colonial age, but they wanted to brutalize and exterminate just as much as you did. They have no other argument in this regard.
Contrast that with the United States of America. Recall the end of World War II, for example. We were the only country with the Atomic bomb (yes, yes, along with our British cousins, but they were prostrate, voting Churchill out of office as soon as Hitler shot himself), we had millions of men under arms, with the most advanced weapons, already positioned in Europe, and the entire world lay at our feet. We could have incorporated Western Europe into one messy little colony and rolled on to Moscow, nuking any army that got in our way. China would never have fallen to Mao, and we could have used our nuclear dominance to keep everyone paying us tribute for all time (Damn, why didn't we do it! That sounds great. Maybe I could have wound up as American Pro-Consul in sunny Barcelona or even Paris – but given my luck, I more likely would have been given Helsinki or some other frigid northern locale.)
What did we do? We disarmed. We broke up the greatest military machine that the world ever assembled and went back home, with hundreds of thousands of former GIs setting down their rifles and going to college in the most massive education program in history.
What do you think Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, Poland, Argentina, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Burma, or even freshly minted East Timor and any of the other 190-odd countries in the world would have done in similar circumstances? YOU ALL WOULD HAVE KEPT ON MARCHING TO MOSCOW AND BEYOND, TAKING OVER ANYTHING IN SIGHT, KILLING EVERYONE WHO TRIED TO STOP YOU!
Admit it. No other country in the history of humanity has ever acted as benevolently as the United States did then … or, is doing again today.
Once more, our economic and political power is predominant in the world. The Soviet alliance has collapsed and it is every nation for itself. No single country could stand up to us. You Euros are flapping your lips continuously about how dangerous we are. If that were the least bit true, Canada and Mexico would be first in line to see us marching in to take over. Instead, millions of Canadians and Mexicans are flooding across the border to invade us. Neither Jean nor Vicente loses a second's sleep worrying about U.S. military power. Yes, McDonald's, yes, Hollywood schlock, but that's about it.
China will undoubtedly grow into a major economic and military threat to the United States, and even though the Chinese are arrogant enough to consider themselves superior to every other nation, we do nothing to them. You can bet China would whack us if they could, and would in the future, if they ever think they can get away with it.
No, only one country is going to get the full U.S. treatment and that is Iraq. And its people will be deliriously ecstatic once we free them. Remember how wrong you were about Afghanistan last year, gleefully hoping that the U.S. military power would be humiliated as all you Europeans were trying to take over the country. There again is the difference – we invaded to free the people, and they knew it.
From what we see on this side of the Great Pond, you Europeans are going the way of the Romans, giving the citizens bread and circus to keep them quiet, in your case, the welfare state. You have failed to modernize your armed forces and instead diverted the money to give cradle to grave benefits, as the be-all and end-all in existence. Again, that all derives from the collapse of European faith in Christianity, the lack of anything to take its place.
In order to start making amends, you may extend to me every courtesy the next time I fly over, and request that your young women laugh at my jokes this time, not flee in the disgust as they generally have done. Thank you.
"The best of the Europeans are here [in the USA], and the ones whose grandparents missed the boat are over there, where most of them will stay." Ibit, Wesley Pruden.
The most hilarious book ever.
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