on wed NUMBER NUMBER NUMBER at NUMBER NUMBER frank bergmann wrote a more reasonable explication of the eu us differences according to some american journalist cited in a german magazine can someone help me is that the american public perceives the rest of the world basically as a thread against which you have to defend yourself using power this is not a correct assessment the american public couldn t care less however the us intelligence community correctly perceives a threat and it isn t the third world many european and other developed nations aggressively engage in covert operations against american interests its been going on for years and isn t even news things have stepped up in recent years and the us dod is none too pleased for better or worse the us is relatively good at that game too as with most backwater wars they are proxies for the interests of the big players find a current list of the top intelligence threats to the us you ll find that half the countries on that list are european most people are unaware of how aggressive these things have gotten in recent years on the other hand the europeans are used to the peace of their cozy post war system where external security is not an issue all security threads can be resolved by giving money to the threatening people and to integrate them into the wealthy sphere balkan palestinians bullshit the european governments ruthlessly suppress real opposition obviously some more than others us specops are often brought in to do dirty work inside europe for european governments usually with government advisors along for the mission i ve always wondered what the deal was such that we got involved at all the point being that we ve acted as assassins for european governments inside their borders against their own citizens under the auspices of those governments and in recent years not ancient history i know specop guys who left the military specifically because of the circumstances of some of these missions while they were posted for that duty i m certainly glad i was never assigned missions in that theater because there is a lot of covert nastiness going on in nominally friendly european democracies regardless giving money to people that threaten you has never created meaningful peace in the history of civilization we call it extortion under any other guise a lot of the current eu us issues can be explained by this difference of perception such as the current american unilateralism nobody wants to help us the american arrogance towards europe they don t want to do anything so why should we ask them and the growing rejection of the american policy in europe they want to abolish the law europe is looking increasingly like a basket case whatever problems the us is having these days europe looks worse and is going downhill faster why the us would want to emulate european behavior or the european way of doing things is beyond me the us asking for major policy advice from europe is like asking a quack for medical advice i really don t see what is wrong with unilateral anyway why should anyone join a stampede that is heading for a cliff i hope the incessant knee jerk conformist screeching that americans see coming from europe doesn t actually represent the views of europeans for various reasons i m not exactly a cheerleader for the us government but the premises of the argument against them here are lame my personal point is that few americans percentage of overall population have ever left their country while even german construction workers regularly spend their holidays in spain so i m not surprised that paranoia is growing i m betting you are underestimating the actual percentage the vast majority of people i know have lived worked and traveled outside the country at one time or another and i doubt europeans have traveled anywhere near as much in the western hemisphere as americans have despite the best efforts of france europe is still not the center of the universe i ll throw you a bone though most americans do consider europe to be drifting into irrelevancy and therefore ignore it but from the perspective of an american how could you not look at it this way the impact of europe on america has diminished greatly over the years i love the smell of euro chauvinism in the morning first you assume that the north american continent is ethnically and culturally homogenous anybody that has actually traveled throughout north america knows this isn t true there are more than five major and very distinct cultures and societies in the us alone never mind the hundreds of diverse regional sub populations some of which are truly foreign apparently europeans confuse speaking the same language with having the same culture that would be like saying mexico is culturally identical to spain because they nominally speak the same language a wyoming rancher has almost nothing in common culturally or socially with your average person living in san francisco despite speaking the same language and nominally living in the same country if i want to visit a wildly different culture for the holidays i ll go to oakland new orleans or similar they are far more different from where i live than some countries i ve traveled to and a lot of these places are farther from where i live than spain is from germany second the state i live in is the size of germany when i travel to a neighboring state which i do regularly how is this not equivalent in fact i probably travel much farther for the holidays than your german construction workers if you look at the eu as a single country only then does your analogy become comparable what kind of ridiculous superiority do europeans get from having relatively tiny countries in truth i find europe to be about as culturally homogeneous as the us there are a lot of cultural similarities across the eu with relatively minor local deviations that vary with distance in ways very similar to the us the only real difference is that europeans have dozens of different languages which is hardly something i would call an advantage although there are a couple parts of the us where i can t understand a word they are saying either james rogers jamesr URL 