Adam's Apple
Senior Member
- Apr 25, 2004
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Very thoughtful article with great suggestions by Victor Davis Hanson.
July 01, 2005, 10:51 a.m.
American Zen
By Victor Davis Hanson for National Review
While the world debated whether an American guard at Guantanamo really flushed a Koran down a toilet, Robert Mugabe may have bulldozed the homes of 1.5 million Zimbabweans. Few seem to have cared.
To do so would be a messy, complicated thing lecturing a black third-world leader to stop tormenting his own poor; pleading with other African states not to allow the genesis of another Rwanda; and, probably, being embarrassed by someone who doesnt give a hoot what a Western elite liberal says.
Mao, whose minions killed somewhere between 40 and 50 million, is still popular in China. That Communist country is deemed by many Western allies as less of a threat than the United States and its elected president, who routinely appears with a Hitler-moustache in European demonstrations.
The new general rule: Global morality is established by the degree the United States can be blamed. Millions of lives lost, vast corruption, thousands of refugees all that cant quite equate with a U.S. soldier showing insensitivity, or an American detention center with mere doctors, ethnic food, and religious accommodations.
All this is not mere theater anymore, but serious stuff, since we are at war with thousands of troops in harms way counting on our support. America (meaning its liberal contingent) should wake up to this near-religious hatred unless it is so far gone itself that it really believes the arguments of silly university-press books about our own pathologies and pernicious empire.
So how does the United States navigate nimbly between its weariness with the thankless role of a superpower and the dangers of a nostalgic isolationism? We need to find a sort of Zen-like philosophical balance that brings both some maturity to our pampered critics and psychic relief to ourselves, without endangering our own security or abandoning our true allies while in the middle of a war and a polarized electorate here at home.
for full article:
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson.asp
July 01, 2005, 10:51 a.m.
American Zen
By Victor Davis Hanson for National Review
While the world debated whether an American guard at Guantanamo really flushed a Koran down a toilet, Robert Mugabe may have bulldozed the homes of 1.5 million Zimbabweans. Few seem to have cared.
To do so would be a messy, complicated thing lecturing a black third-world leader to stop tormenting his own poor; pleading with other African states not to allow the genesis of another Rwanda; and, probably, being embarrassed by someone who doesnt give a hoot what a Western elite liberal says.
Mao, whose minions killed somewhere between 40 and 50 million, is still popular in China. That Communist country is deemed by many Western allies as less of a threat than the United States and its elected president, who routinely appears with a Hitler-moustache in European demonstrations.
The new general rule: Global morality is established by the degree the United States can be blamed. Millions of lives lost, vast corruption, thousands of refugees all that cant quite equate with a U.S. soldier showing insensitivity, or an American detention center with mere doctors, ethnic food, and religious accommodations.
All this is not mere theater anymore, but serious stuff, since we are at war with thousands of troops in harms way counting on our support. America (meaning its liberal contingent) should wake up to this near-religious hatred unless it is so far gone itself that it really believes the arguments of silly university-press books about our own pathologies and pernicious empire.
So how does the United States navigate nimbly between its weariness with the thankless role of a superpower and the dangers of a nostalgic isolationism? We need to find a sort of Zen-like philosophical balance that brings both some maturity to our pampered critics and psychic relief to ourselves, without endangering our own security or abandoning our true allies while in the middle of a war and a polarized electorate here at home.
for full article:
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson.asp
