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That article sounds like a load of right-wing hooey to me.
The premise is based on the fact that the U.S. hasn't gone all-out and used all of its resources against a country since WWII. Well, no shit. That was the last World War, after all. Seems to me, if a war involves damn near the entire globe, you might be forced to get the lead out in a bit of a higher quantity than usual.
The US waited to get involved in WWII until it was obvious that the Axis were an honest-to-gosh threat to take over America. Then we added our troops to a worldwide effort that included countries that, at the time, were more powerful than the U.S., i.e. Britain and Russia.
The U.S. used its full military might because there was a legitimate threat that the Nazis might be landing amphibious troop carriers on the coast of Maine if the government didn't do something.
Vietnam and Iraq are completely different animals. In Vietnam, the threat was the so-called domino effect: "If we let the Russkies bring their Commie values to Vietnam, God knows who will be next!!! Before we know it, Asia could be all Commie, all the time!!!" Just as ridiculous then as it sounds now.
Iraq is very similar: "It's a haven of terrorists, and they have TEH NUKULAR BOMMZ1!1!11!" That was enough to get the majority to support it, by making them want to piss their pants. "Let's go get 'em before they get us!" That sort of rhetoric has been effective since forever. Scare the shit out of people and they will fall in line.
Okay, I've just read over this article for the third time, and I find that it pisses me off even more:
It began, I believe, in a late-20th-century event that transformed the world more profoundly than the collapse of communism: the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority, political legitimacy and even sovereignty
Really? Fucking really? That's why we invaded a country of non-whites in order to impose our values on them?
This does not mean that President Bush is insincere in his desire to bring democracy to Iraq, nor is it to say that democracy won't ultimately be socially transformative in Iraq. It's just that today the United States cannot go to war in the Third World simply to defeat a dangerous enemy.
Well, gee whiz! I could have sworn that the reason we went to war in Iraq was to stop that awful, awful man Saddam Hussein from nuking New York City. He had weapons of mass destruction, don't ya know.
White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems--even the tyrannies they live under--were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must "understand" and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war--and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.
Isn't it awful? That "white guilt" makes our enemies into people! The very thought that we might have to "understand" them before we bomb them! The audacity! It (and I have to post this again, it's so awful) "makes our Third World enemies into colored victims."
Anti-Americanism, whether in Europe or on the American left, works by the mechanism of white guilt. It stigmatizes America with all the imperialistic and racist ugliness of the white Western past so that America becomes a kind of straw man, a construct of Western sin. (The Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons were the focus of such stigmatization campaigns.)
Because Abu Ghraib and Gitmo would be rightfully seen as the institutes of justness and fairness that they are, if it weren't for that "white guilt."
Fuck that article.
Is this a joke thread? I really, really hope so, because that was one of the biggest piles of hideous, jingoistic shit that I've ever read. I have so much more to say about that article, but I'll reserve it, in the hopes that this article isn't actually being taken seriously on Barbelith. It must be May Fool's Day. |
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