American Moral Amnesia (squared)

Sometimes I think before I write. Not today. I have this gut feeling that the idea (brewing in my head for several weeks now) will come out by itself and all I have to do is frame it within the poor English vocabulary that I possess.

These are all inter-related topics although each one must stand on its own merit of its own, and by itself. How you put them together is your business, I still think we’ll all arrive at the same conclusion (more or less).

1. Dissent; It is believed that Thomas Jefferson was wrongly accused of having said: “dissent is the highest form of Patriotism”. OK, suppose it wasn’t him. It does take a lot of guts to dissent or to be non-acquiescent in any other shape or form. The other brilliant view on patriotism still stands: “A true patriot must always be ready to protect his country against his government – Edward Abbey. So does Alfred Lord Tennyson’s: Half a truth is often the blackest of lies. Seems there is no doubt about the: "Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President." - President Theodore Roosevelt. I am still inclined to think that dissent is the very essence of liberty.

2. Even throughout our (fairly short) history, we did fight for many noble causes, (the war for independence against the British) and a few less noble wars (the Civil War, the expulsion of Native American Indians – followed by the frenzied land grab, The war against Mexico – where we simply annexed Texas, California, Nevada. The act or annexing is called Anschluss in German, and there is this mustached fellow, whom nobody likes much any more but he decided that Austria is actually Germany so he annexed it a little bit. If the essence of morality and objectivity mandates that we view all events (ours and theirs) through the same set of standards, then we took a little bit of a hypocrisy into our bosom when we, ever so conveniently forgot that we too, have annexed, for which we would have stoned this mustached German national.

3. Now during the Clinton years, the American policy took an absolute nosedive in terms of foreign relations. American’s are rightfully more concerned with social security, Medicare, schools, taxes, unemployment and similar. Finding Burkina Faso on a map must be terribly painful to many college graduates, and we really don’t care. Other than Burkina Faso we looked at this small country of Yugoslavia and isolated their smaller yet province of Kosovo. Benjamin Schwarz states: President Clinton's actions toward the conflict in Kosovo are directed by a guiding principle of his foreign policy: that America must "give back to a contentious world some of the lessons we learned during our own democratic voyage." Indeed, exporting "democratic values," specifically tolerance and pluralism that have come to be regarded as central to the American creed, has emerged as a foreign policy imperative embraced by both Democrats and Republicans. Statesmen and foreign policy mandarins tout these "democratic values" and America's supposed heritage of harmonious diversity and civic comity as the solution to the world's civil wars - the Kosovos, the Albanias, the Bosnias and the Chechnyas - that have proliferated in the post-Cold War world. U.S. policymakers smugly urge (and then, paradoxically, try to force) these fragmented societies to play nice: to elevate compromise and tolerance above ethnic, nationalist or religious domination as their organizing principles, just as we do in multiethnic, multicultural, multi-faith America. But these bromides are rooted in an idealized view of America's development, not the historical reality.”

4. Being a little hasty Tom Lantos (ethnic Hungarian Jew) prominently and cleverly pro-Israel in many of his views, shot himself in the foot by supporting the Kosovo’s move towards independence. That was foolish on two counts: A) Kosovo independence is financed and bankrolled by the Islamists interests from Asia Minor (Saudi Arabia, Jihad multinational volunteers from Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, etc. The eventual success of establishing another Islamic state in Europe (besides Bosnia) is an imminent threat to the few remaining Jews in that part of the world. Historically (you are just going to have to trust me on this one) Serbians were used as a “buffer” against the Islamic expansion (during the Ottoman Empire’s most dominant era), and an additional buffer in the West’s Cold War against the Soviet Union by both sides. If Tom Lantos is truly concerned with the well-being of the Jews elsewhere (not only Israel) he’d be wiser to lend his support to the Serbian rightful claim to Kosovo province and oppose their partition from Serbia proper. B) Osama bin Laden is alleged to hold both Bosnian and Albanian passports (I didn’t see them first hand, so I can’t say if they are forged or not). OK Tom Lantos, whose side are you intentionally on? Do you, or do you not support the Jewish interests on a more global basis, or only in your own backyard.

5. American independence was won through a tough war against the British, in that war we were aided by many other European nationals, who were charmed by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. We remain grateful to the Polish Kasimir Pulaski, General Koschiusko, French Marquis d’ Lafayette, German/French General Steuben and many others. So we know that our democracy and liberty were hard earned, many times by a direct military conflict (Civil War not withstanding). If we presume that our painful process of achieving these noble goals was attained through military conflicts, why and how would we today put an end to some other military conflict that is possibly a birthplace of another democracy – liberty acceptable to them and good to them for their use and consumption – not ours. Another cute little hypocrisy on our part. Let me take another chapter from Benjamin Schwartz*: “In decrying the merciless use of force in Kosovo, Americans seem not to realize that their own Civil War was hardly different. The United States nearly destroyed itself in the central episode of its nation-building - a brutal and irreconcilable nationalist-separatist conflict in which one vision of America crushed another. Although the Constitution (of 1787), like many of the means lauded by foreign policy analysts today to forestall civil conflict, attempted to equalize sectional differences by guaranteeing the South a disproportionate voice in national politics, this could not work in the long run for the United States. The arrangement foundered as the North's power and ambitions grew, and the South refused to become subordinate to or dependent on an opposing, and increasingly threatening, ideology and political economy. In the end the North's vision - of a powerful centralized state, a so-called "Yankee Leviathan," deemed necessary for capitalist development - emerged as the nation's. This vision, despite a persistent mythology promulgated by the victors, was triumphant not because it was intellectually or morally superior; it prevailed, as the United States prevailed over Mexico 20 years earlier, through superior force. The U.S. foreign policy community self-righteously proclaims that America should pressure and tutor societies plagued by ethnic, nationalist and separatist wars to adopt "reasonable" solutions to these conflicts. But the history we brandish as a light to nations is largely a sanctimonious tissue of myth and self-infatuation. Taken without illusion, our national experience gives us no right to preach, but it should prepare us to understand the brutal realities of nation-building, at home and abroad.

6. Pre-Natal autopsy**. If we are indeed sure that our engagement in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Koreas will produce a great new pro-American democracy, offer them our form of prescription for happiness – we are both foolish and dead wrong on top of being terribly arrogant. Now for us to be absolutely certain we are doing the “right thing” we must engage in a careful examination (pre-natal autopsy) of the fetus called freedom/democracy/liberty and determine it is not Satan incarnate. How can we perform that autopsy before that embryonic form of democracy/freedom/liberty is even born? We can’t. We again arrive at: “we are both foolish and dead wrong on top of being terribly arrogant” – is it any wonder the lost a few allies in the recent years? The French, the Germans, the Spaniards have all walked out from our self-righteously proclaimed “war on terror”. As strange as it seems I do agree with the fact that our military must be engaged to combat any possible future terror – but I can’t find a person clever enough to identify that threat and the host countries (other than mere suppositions). The “pre-natal autopsy” is closer to butchering some small foreign country on account of our fears or CIA’s lack of accurate data, or Tom Lantos’s misguided pro-Israeli stand.

7. In conclusion, I think there is enough material where we can all agree to disagree (on many issues), but resorting to a military action frivolously or readily makes it only more hard to patch up the peace afterwards. No, that is not the same as a policy of appeasement where we can sit back and watch a football game while half of the world is bleeding.

8. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is often mistakenly portrayed as a villain. I can’t buy that either. If he were a true villain he would not have the nightmares that he did, he would not have the doubts and keep seeking an answer in the post-Hellenic Oracle of the three witches… Macbeth was a valiant captain (rank of today’s general or similar) and a worthy subject of Kind Duncan. His vanity and ambition (aided by his wife’s appetite for power) brought him to commit many crimes – and yes some of those crimes are truly awful, barbaric, cruel, inhuman, but they don’t make the entire composite of Macbeth’s image into a total and absolute villain. He did have many redeeming qualities. His worst trait was aggression and for that only he stands guilty in my mind. Even at the closing hours of his kingdom he comes out alone challenging the entire English army with words: Whilst I see lives the gashes look better on them. Why should I play a Roman fool and die of mine own sword? He charges into McDuff. That vanity and that aggression were his true downfall not his many cruelties committed during his reign. Every man is a lot more than the acts he commits. At the very least every man is a sum total of the acts he committed. Image of Gandhi come to my mind: take a salt shaker and a pepper mill, empty them both into one pile and try to separate the black from the white particles. What fool would bother with such a task? Not even Sisiphus.

Iliya Pavlovich
*Benjamin Schwartz : SOURCE: Excerpted from the 30 March, 1999, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Edition
** source: baltimore.indymedia.org/newswire/display/9596/index.php