America vs. The World, or Why a Rogue World Hates Us
Noam Chomsky, the literary and philosophical guru of the American Left, recently declared that not only was the United States a “failed state,” but even worse, a “leading rogue state” whose leaders and policies he likened to the Nazis who were tried at Nuremberg. Americans, according to Chomsky, and especially American soldiers, must “pay massive reparations to the victims for the crimes they committed.” Do you want to know what “crimes” Chomsky said have been perpetrated against poor Third World people by Americans? Economic sanctions against Iraq, and ostensibly enforcement of the United Nations’ “No Fly Zone” zone are some of them. Chomsky included 1980s support for Saddam Hussein’s regime as an American atrocity against the Iraqis, which conveniently allows him to blame all of Hussein’s atrocities against his own people on the U.S., even after the first Persian Gulf War.
The fact that, as Chomsky claims, much of the world considers the U.S. as “a threat to their existence,” and that the war in Iraq has “raised an enormous hostility throughout much of the world, and particularly the Muslim world,” shouldn’t particularly worry any historically-minded American. It just means that the real bad guys have been put on notice. Much of the world should consider us a threat to their existence. You want to know why? Because what the average happy-go-lucky American and politically-correct-even-unto-their-own-undoing European on the street doesn’t realize, is that most of the world is not like “us.” Most people in the world live in real rogue states where dictators and warlords rule with an iron fist and an AK-47. There is no such thing as freedom and democracy, they’ve never heard of civil rights, and you could be killed for being a woman walking out by yourself or holding hands with someone of the same sex in public.
Further more, the notion that the Islamist-controlled Muslim world has been outraged by our mission to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East doesn’t concern me one bit. The Islamists have been angered by our existence and have terrorized Americans since President Jefferson’s time. They cold-heartedly flew airliners packed with innocent men, women, and children into our buildings, filled with more innocent men, women, and children, long before we ever “invaded” Iraq.
As for the other countries that are “threatened” by us, whose people mistrust us, or wish us ill will, well, let’s take a look shall we. Russia and China certainly have reason to fear us. The Russians once murdered millions of their own countrymen during Stalin’s purges, and their communist yoke enslaved much of the European and Eurasian world. They miss the good ol’ days and are eager for revenge against the Americans, who brought down the Iron Curtain, freed millions of Europeans, and won the Cold War. The Chinese, under Mao Zedong, murdered just as many, if not more of their own people than the Soviets did, and were checked by American forces in their attempt to take South Korea during the Korean War. And dang it, the pesky U.S. Navy keeps them from attacking, subjugating, and oppressing the people of Taiwan.
The French thought they could stick it to their old nemesis, Great Britain, by throwing their lot in with the early Americans and helping us defeat the British. All along, however, the French wanted nothing to do with the new United States or democracy, and thought we didn’t have a chance in heck of succeeding. As it turned out, our democracy not only prevailed, but its spirit eventually led to the collapse of France’s ruling monarchy, as well as many of the dictatorial monarchies of the world. France, once the epitome of “global” leadership and culture, has since taken a back seat (they might actually be in the trunk!) to America, whose so-called “Cultural Imperialism” (i.e., everyone in the world likes the stuff we make more than their own stuff) the French claim is taking over the planet. So, yeah, the French don’t like us at all and are always secretly helping our antagonists, like Saddam Hussein, et all. Actually, in World War II they openly helped the people we would fight, when the Vichy French government sided with the Nazis.
I won’t even get into why the Germans aren’t fond of the United States. Historically, American-German animosity goes back a long way, to the days when Hessian mercenaries mercilessly bayoneted surrendering American soldiers during the Battle of Long Island in the American Revolution. Therefore, events like the Battle of Trenton, World War I, and World War II become symbols of obvious, simplistic reasons. The United States occupied West Germany outright for ten years after World War II, and to this day we still have military bases and nuclear weapons there. Ironically, the Germans depended on the United States the most during the Cold War, to protect them from the Soviet Union.
The rest of Western Europe can’t stand us because we stand up to the Islamists, unlike the Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, Swiss, Italians, Spaniards, etc., whose societies are being overrun by self-ostracized, disaffected Muslim youths being indoctrinated in European state-funded mosques to turn Europe into an Islamic caliphate. Yea, multiculturalism! Many of the Europeans might be alarmed if they weren’t too busy lambasting the United States and Israel, while carrying out their usual anti-Semitic antics. The Europeans, much like many leftist Democrats here, would love nothing more than for the U.S. to be “humbled” (read “defeated”) in the Global War on Terrorism, if anything, so that they could look down their noses at us while sipping café au laits and say: “I told you so!” while paying tributes to their new Islamist masters.
Perhaps what really riles all those people, groups, and nations who “hate” us, many of them who once had powerful empires stretching across continents, is that our nation has become the world’s sole superpower not at the point of a bayonet, as they did it, but through the success of our ideas and our economic and political model. Americans don’t have to invade, conquer, occupy or annex. Nobody can point to any real imperialist “empire” Americans cling woefully to, as the French, Dutch, Germans, Russians, Italians, Spanish, and British all tried and failed in. Peaceful, freedom-loving people aren’t afraid of American soldiers, the way Europeans feared the murderous Nazis or marauding Soviet troops. Our military isn’t made up of poor, uneducated draftees. American soldiers are volunteers who believe in what they are doing, without promises of empire or war booty. That’s what galls these rogue regimes—that our country is the only nation whose sons and daughters volunteer, and are willing to fight in foreign lands they’ve never heard of, for oppressed people whose customs and language they don’t understand, so that those people might become free.
Just think about that for a moment. Americans have gone off to fight and die in places like France, Belgium, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the only land we’ve ever asked for in return, as Colin Powell once said, was a little place to bury our dead.
That is why we are hated. Because our enemies cannot understand this type of person—the American—tolerant, generous, free, and independent-minded. Our enemies know that the United States can never be defeated. America isn’t a place whose capital you can occupy, or whose buildings you can destroy, to make us surrender. You can’t defeat an idea, and that is what America represents—freedom, democracy, and a scorn of oppression—that burns in the heart of each one of us.
As for the other countries in the world who consider us a threat to their existence: Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea (many of these countries, by the way, are, or were members of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council—go figure!), as well as the groups who also consider America a “rogue state”: Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Ansar al Islam, Islamic Jihad, etc, etc., I just have one thing to say to them: Be afraid! Be very afraid!
Noam Chomsky, the literary and philosophical guru of the American Left, recently declared that not only was the United States a “failed state,” but even worse, a “leading rogue state” whose leaders and policies he likened to the Nazis who were tried at Nuremberg. Americans, according to Chomsky, and especially American soldiers, must “pay massive reparations to the victims for the crimes they committed.” Do you want to know what “crimes” Chomsky said have been perpetrated against poor Third World people by Americans? Economic sanctions against Iraq, and ostensibly enforcement of the United Nations’ “No Fly Zone” zone are some of them. Chomsky included 1980s support for Saddam Hussein’s regime as an American atrocity against the Iraqis, which conveniently allows him to blame all of Hussein’s atrocities against his own people on the U.S., even after the first Persian Gulf War.
The fact that, as Chomsky claims, much of the world considers the U.S. as “a threat to their existence,” and that the war in Iraq has “raised an enormous hostility throughout much of the world, and particularly the Muslim world,” shouldn’t particularly worry any historically-minded American. It just means that the real bad guys have been put on notice. Much of the world should consider us a threat to their existence. You want to know why? Because what the average happy-go-lucky American and politically-correct-even-unto-their-own-undoing European on the street doesn’t realize, is that most of the world is not like “us.” Most people in the world live in real rogue states where dictators and warlords rule with an iron fist and an AK-47. There is no such thing as freedom and democracy, they’ve never heard of civil rights, and you could be killed for being a woman walking out by yourself or holding hands with someone of the same sex in public.
Further more, the notion that the Islamist-controlled Muslim world has been outraged by our mission to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East doesn’t concern me one bit. The Islamists have been angered by our existence and have terrorized Americans since President Jefferson’s time. They cold-heartedly flew airliners packed with innocent men, women, and children into our buildings, filled with more innocent men, women, and children, long before we ever “invaded” Iraq.
As for the other countries that are “threatened” by us, whose people mistrust us, or wish us ill will, well, let’s take a look shall we. Russia and China certainly have reason to fear us. The Russians once murdered millions of their own countrymen during Stalin’s purges, and their communist yoke enslaved much of the European and Eurasian world. They miss the good ol’ days and are eager for revenge against the Americans, who brought down the Iron Curtain, freed millions of Europeans, and won the Cold War. The Chinese, under Mao Zedong, murdered just as many, if not more of their own people than the Soviets did, and were checked by American forces in their attempt to take South Korea during the Korean War. And dang it, the pesky U.S. Navy keeps them from attacking, subjugating, and oppressing the people of Taiwan.
The French thought they could stick it to their old nemesis, Great Britain, by throwing their lot in with the early Americans and helping us defeat the British. All along, however, the French wanted nothing to do with the new United States or democracy, and thought we didn’t have a chance in heck of succeeding. As it turned out, our democracy not only prevailed, but its spirit eventually led to the collapse of France’s ruling monarchy, as well as many of the dictatorial monarchies of the world. France, once the epitome of “global” leadership and culture, has since taken a back seat (they might actually be in the trunk!) to America, whose so-called “Cultural Imperialism” (i.e., everyone in the world likes the stuff we make more than their own stuff) the French claim is taking over the planet. So, yeah, the French don’t like us at all and are always secretly helping our antagonists, like Saddam Hussein, et all. Actually, in World War II they openly helped the people we would fight, when the Vichy French government sided with the Nazis.
I won’t even get into why the Germans aren’t fond of the United States. Historically, American-German animosity goes back a long way, to the days when Hessian mercenaries mercilessly bayoneted surrendering American soldiers during the Battle of Long Island in the American Revolution. Therefore, events like the Battle of Trenton, World War I, and World War II become symbols of obvious, simplistic reasons. The United States occupied West Germany outright for ten years after World War II, and to this day we still have military bases and nuclear weapons there. Ironically, the Germans depended on the United States the most during the Cold War, to protect them from the Soviet Union.
The rest of Western Europe can’t stand us because we stand up to the Islamists, unlike the Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, Swiss, Italians, Spaniards, etc., whose societies are being overrun by self-ostracized, disaffected Muslim youths being indoctrinated in European state-funded mosques to turn Europe into an Islamic caliphate. Yea, multiculturalism! Many of the Europeans might be alarmed if they weren’t too busy lambasting the United States and Israel, while carrying out their usual anti-Semitic antics. The Europeans, much like many leftist Democrats here, would love nothing more than for the U.S. to be “humbled” (read “defeated”) in the Global War on Terrorism, if anything, so that they could look down their noses at us while sipping café au laits and say: “I told you so!” while paying tributes to their new Islamist masters.
Perhaps what really riles all those people, groups, and nations who “hate” us, many of them who once had powerful empires stretching across continents, is that our nation has become the world’s sole superpower not at the point of a bayonet, as they did it, but through the success of our ideas and our economic and political model. Americans don’t have to invade, conquer, occupy or annex. Nobody can point to any real imperialist “empire” Americans cling woefully to, as the French, Dutch, Germans, Russians, Italians, Spanish, and British all tried and failed in. Peaceful, freedom-loving people aren’t afraid of American soldiers, the way Europeans feared the murderous Nazis or marauding Soviet troops. Our military isn’t made up of poor, uneducated draftees. American soldiers are volunteers who believe in what they are doing, without promises of empire or war booty. That’s what galls these rogue regimes—that our country is the only nation whose sons and daughters volunteer, and are willing to fight in foreign lands they’ve never heard of, for oppressed people whose customs and language they don’t understand, so that those people might become free.
Just think about that for a moment. Americans have gone off to fight and die in places like France, Belgium, Germany, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the only land we’ve ever asked for in return, as Colin Powell once said, was a little place to bury our dead.
That is why we are hated. Because our enemies cannot understand this type of person—the American—tolerant, generous, free, and independent-minded. Our enemies know that the United States can never be defeated. America isn’t a place whose capital you can occupy, or whose buildings you can destroy, to make us surrender. You can’t defeat an idea, and that is what America represents—freedom, democracy, and a scorn of oppression—that burns in the heart of each one of us.
As for the other countries in the world who consider us a threat to their existence: Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea (many of these countries, by the way, are, or were members of the United Nations’ Human Rights Council—go figure!), as well as the groups who also consider America a “rogue state”: Al Qaeda, Al Qaeda in Iraq, Hamas, Hizbollah, Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Ansar al Islam, Islamic Jihad, etc, etc., I just have one thing to say to them: Be afraid! Be very afraid!
posted by victor cass | 12:55 AM
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