Posted on 03/17/2003 2:11:14 PM PST by quidnunc
Ottawa – America is becoming unhinged and it is impossible to imagine that Canada will be not affected.
This was not the case after 9/11. The attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., were sad and tragic but they built a unity that took the form of a new patriotism inside the United States — and a new international solidarity with America outside the country. It isn't true that this new-found patriotism and solidarity had no depth. Sure, some of it was as disposable as the feelings that emerge from a night at the Oscars. But at its heart was a genuine sympathy for the lost lives of ordinary people and a steely willingness to rally behind any sensible idea or cause that might prevent a reoccurrence of 9/11.
Most of that goodwill has been squandered now. The Bush administration has managed to drive a wedge between the American people and between America and the rest of the world. It is the kind of division that has not existed since the Vietnam War. America erupted in those days and Canada rolled with the tremours. On the one hand, Canadian industry actively supplied the U.S. military; on the other, Pierre Trudeau's Canada offered sanctuary to thousands of young American war objectors along with regular though mild criticism of U.S. policy. It did Canada little harm. But the American empire was younger, more secure in those days. In the three decades since Vietnam, America has aged centuries.
America, following the loss of the Vietnam War, was chastened. It wasn't something that a politician could brag about but it was largely wholesome: like a reformed alcoholic making a searching and fearless moral inventory of himself or herself, as the 12-step program would put it.
The Jimmy Carter administration provided the right setting for this process and was starting to get around to making amends to those who were harmed by the country's addiction to violence when the process came to a halt. Politically, a national amnesia set in. When the Soviet empire crumbled under its own weight with an admirable — and nonviolent — shove from Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II and Mikhail Gorbachev, Washington erroneously took the credit for it. That misconception set the stage for the kind of policy that rules today.
A penitent America was a hopeful thing but it didn't last long in Washington, D.C.
By the time the World Trade Centre Towers were destroyed, all the lessons hard-learned in South East Asia were forgotten. Following an initial response of conservative-style moral clarity and decisiveness, the Bush White House increasingly grew to emphasize a heightened sense of imperial destiny. It expressed itself in a disdain for the encumbrance of multinational organizations, a reluctance for, if not an outright avoidance of treaties, a new emphasis on militarism, a discomfit with refugee and immigration responsibilities and a rising tendency to sacrifice cherished constitutional freedoms to national security.
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(Excerpt) Read more at thehilltimes.ca ...
This is as far as I could get.
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