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the wrath of nations

October 30th, 2005

skippy dot net » the wrath of nations

I’m down with all this and I’ve always thought along these lines and thought I was a lonely genius pariah.

A couple choice select selections that I chose:

Nationalism, of course, is intrinsically absurd. Why should the accident - fortune or misfortune - of birth as an American, Albanian, Scot or Fiji Islander impose loyalties that dominate an individual life and structure a society so as to place it in formal conflict with others?

The Jewish and Christian Bible begins with God’s commission to Adam, in Genesis, to rule over the earth adn its creatures; and wesyern civilization has since been distinguished by an exploratory and exploitative approach to the animal kingdom and the material universe. The western belief that the world and history itself are to be mastered to man’s advantage has its origin here.

The notion of the moral superiority of the West was finished in Asia after that, survivng only with respect to the United States, which between the wars and for a brief period after World War II continued to enjoy the reputation of a liberating powe, and itself continued, until its defeat in Vietnam, to believe that it was capable of conveying political enlightenment to backwards people.

The West’s Christian missionaries went to Asia determined to demonstrate that Asian philosophies were wrong, that Asian religions were blasphemous, and that Asian must worship the unique and omnipotent God known to the Europeans. These missionaries’ twentieth-century secular conterparts, whether agents of the World Bank or the Internation Monetary Fund, or American soldiers fighting to impose an Amercian political solution upon Vietnam (or Cambodia), have been equally convinced of the superiority of western political and economic ideas, and equally determined that they be adoped by Asians.

The American nation is not like the others. Its nationalism is that of an ideological nation. Its history is seperate. It accepts no comparison with others, and so it has been the most nationalistic of all the major nations. Not only politicians and public men but the people themselves constantly assert its superiority over all the others, as if the virtue of its Constitution were proof of permanent national success.

Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism provided an expression of that form of American nationalism more exactly described as national exceptionalism. This holds that American virtues are unparalleled elsewhere and represent a form of more perfect society which the rest of the world strives to attain.

During the Reagan and Bush administrations it was commonly argued that the wish of all the rest of the world to emulate the United States was demonstrated by the fact that there was a vast demand to emigrate to the United States. This did not acknowledge that the principal motive for emigration is poverty and political oppression in the country of emigration, and that the choice of where to go is usually decided by where people can get to, and who will take them in.

There had always been a streak of straightforward nativism and exclusionism in the United States, on the part of those who were already Americans against those who were the latest to come.

A metaphysical challenge suited Americans of the 1940s and afterwards right down to the ground. It was Freedom against Evil. The metaphysical language lasted in presidential speeches certainly through the terms of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

Chews ‘em out!

Entry Filed under: Lifin