From: hallam@zeus02.desy.de (Phill Hallam-Baker)
Subject: Re: Americans! *smile*
Reply-To: Hallam@zeus02.desy.de
Organization: Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron, Experiment ZEUS bei HERA
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 1992 20:31:58 GMT

In article <1992Sep28.004158.26266@morrow.stanford.edu>,
silva@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Holly Silva) writes:

|> (Jon Corelis) writes:
|>>(Holly Silva) writes:
|>>
|>>
|>>>I sense that stock anti-americanism and attendant contempt for 
|>>>american patriotism is less rooted in any intrinsic European wisdom or
|>>>modesty than in a fairly petty, vicious desire to see the US in trouble.
|>>
|>>   I sense that it is rooted in neither, but is rather rooted in the
|>>fact that for the past quarter century, with the sole exception of the
|>>Carter administration, American foreign policy has been consistently and
|>>thoroughly despicable.  And it is rooted in the fact that American
|>>jingoists have appropriated the idea of patriotism to support every
|>>vicious, imperialist, and antidemocratic action of the United States
|>>government.  When was the last time you heard any American publicly or
|>>privately invoke patriotism in an appeal for support of the ideals of
|>>the Declaration of Independence, the values of the Constitution, or the
|>>Whitmanesque vision of America as a unique and mystical bonding of human
|>>individualism and fusion?  No:  never since the day I was born has the
|>
|>	You've never listened to Common Cause or People for the American
|>Way have you?

I think the guy has, rasther more often than he cares for. The NAZIs were pretty
long on "patriotism" you know. Any fool can get up on a platform bedecked with
flags of country X. That does not mean that they have the slightest connection
with the ideals that they preach.

I have met very few US citizens who subscribe to the "principles" of Common
cause or People for the American way. Most of the US citizens I know believe
that freedom and justice are the right of all peoples and that the US has a
monopoly on neither the practice  nor the disemination of such ideas.

Groups that wrap themselves in the flag do so for one reason - because what they
preach is so disgusting that they know that they need something to hide behind.
By hiding behind the flag they claim that to criticize them is to criticize
America and what it stands for.

Since the occupation and colonisation of the Philipeans the principles upon
which the US was founded have been subverted. Millions died under the US empire
just as millions died under the British empire. In both case the only
beneficiaries were the rich magnates of Manchester and New York.

Carter is still respected in Europe as the last President in twenty years who
was neither a fool nor a crook. It was Carter who got Israel and Egypt to sign a
peace treaty and Carter who reduced the tension in the cold war to the point
where the Kremlin finaly accepted that the US did not plan to invade.


|>>flag of patriotism in my country been run up for any causes other than
|>>the suppression of progressive dissent, the enforcement of obience to
|>>establishment dictates, and the furtherance of brutal and selfish
|>>overseas military adventures.
|> 	
|>	And this is very much the fault of our self-hating, craven
|>Liberal wing. The Left or Liberal side of the political spectrum has
|>allowed patriotism and pride in America to be exppropriate by the
|>petty demagogues of the far right during the past quarter century.

If yioiu are of the left you have to beleive that all people are essentialy the
same. Just as the Socialists began with the revolutionary idea that working
class people were in no way inferior to the "upper" classes they do not in
general hold the opinion that people born in one geographic location are any
different to those born in another.


|>I sense strongly that this is due to their belief that all patriotism
|>is nasty _because_ it is intrinsically sentimental, rather than for 
|>any more intelligent reason.

You should learn some history, your words have the chilly echo of Hitlers
distinction between "emotional" anti-semitism and "scientific" anti-semitism.

|> In my experience, this fear/distaste for
|>anything which smacks of patriotism is rooted in a lack of intrinsic
|>American thought on the Left, and in their rather pathetic worship of 
|>all things European. 

Oh come now! Practicaly the whole argument we Europ[eans have against the US is
the fact that in over two hundred years of independence you have not stopped
trying to steal our culture instead of actually recognising your own cutural
achievements. There can be no sentient being who can fail to feel the
electrifying opening of Gershwins raphsody in blue, it stands with the opening
bar Beethoven's 5th symphony as one of man's supreme cultural achievements. Yet
these genuine achievements are subsumed to a tawdry imitation of the Manchester
school of capitalism which we abandoned here a century ago.

|>	i.e., the view of all forms of Swedish-style socialism as
|>intrinsically wonderful, without considering the inapplicability of
|>much of what they've constructed to our much larger, more polyglot
|>society.

As if "People for the American way" ever promoted a pluralistic culture as
opposed to a sanitized version of White European anglo saxon protestant culture.

|>>   In short, American patriotism in our time does not mean love of
|>>country:  it has come to mean lack of commitment to the common good,
|>>unquestioning obedience to the chief executive, contempt for the
|>>Constitution, and a satisfied smacking of lips over the piling up of
|>>third world corpses.  That kind of patriotism deserves contempt, and the
|>>people of the world know it.   
|>
|>	Most of the 'people of the world' today either,
|>
|>	1) engage in this sort of jingoism themselves: (Serbia, Iran,
|>	Iraq,  Le Pen's party in France, Russian nationalists in 
|>	Russia, every nationalist splinter group now active in the
|>	former Soviet Union.....etc., Argentina in re: the Malvinas/
|>	Falklands.......etc.)

Oh yes! at last a right winger admits that everyone is equal! How come when the
right make comparisons with other countries it is only to show how other
countries are as despicable?

Fact is that Le Penn in France is considered by the vast majority of French
people to be an evil bigot. To judge France by Le Penn would be as monstrous as
judging the USA by David Duke or Perot.


|>	2) live in societies which only quite recently eschewed this
|>	form of behavior: (Germany, Britain, Japan)

The case of GB is quite different to what you claim. Fact is that GB gave up on
the out and out capitalist stuff in the 1850s and began pretending that it was
recreating the Roman Empire on a global scale. This is why I had to spend four
years learning Latin and Greek. By the 1930s this wasn't fooling anybody, not
even the British and the question was no longer "how can the empire be
preserved" but "how can it be dismantled safely".

Your comparison to other coutries has the same ring as the child molester who
claims "no it's OK, Fred over there only stopped doing it recently". Like child
molesters, Imperialists usually claim that their crime is to the benefgit of
their victim.


PS Till sends his regards.
--

Phill Hallam-Baker
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa