American Views Abroad

 
This time around Independence Day here is truly a summer's day, when the living should be easy, but what is lacking is any enthusiasm to strike up a band. Travelling through France these last few weeks, I met a fellow American from Nashville, Tennessee who wanted to shake my hand because I didn't vote for the President. 'You are from the North,' he said to me, 'where they got it right.' Well, I suppose I am from the North in more ways than one. In the present New York Review of Books, Tony Judt's The New World Order sums up what really troubles me:

Historians and pundits who leap aboard the bandwagon of American Empire have forgotten a little too quickly that for an empire to be born, a republic has first to die. In the longer run no country can expect to behave imperially --- brutally, contemptuously, illegaly --- abroad while preserving republican values at home. For it is a mistake to suppose that institutions alone will save a republic from the abuses of power to which empire inevitably leads. It is not institutions that make or break republics, it is men. And in the United States today, the men (and women) of the country's political class have failed.

....At the outer edges of the US imperium, in Bratislava or Tiflis, the dream of republican America still lives on, like the fading light from a distant, dying star. But even there the shadows of doubt are growing.

....The American people have a touching faith in the invulnerablility of their republic.....But the twentieth century has taught most other peoples in the world to be less cocksure. And when foreigners look across the oceans at the US today, what they see is far from reassuring.

For there is a precedent in modern Western history for a country whose leader exploits national humiliation and fear to restrict public freedoms; for a government that makes permanent war as a tool of state policy and arranges for the torture of its political enemies....for a culture that asserts its unique destiny and superiority and that worships military prowess; for a political system in which the dominant party manipulates procedural rules and threatens to change the law in order to get its own way; where journalists are intimidated into confessing their errors and made to do public penance.
Europeans in particular have experienced such a regime in the recent past and they have a word for it. That word is not 'democracy.'

The complete article can be read at www.nybooks.com/articles/18113.
- posted by Gloria @ 4:30 PM