[quote]DrSkeptix wrote:
ephrem wrote:
DrSkeptix wrote:(Perhaps this is a perspective that you, and possibly Ephrem, cannot enjoy, since you are not exposed to travel outside the confines–intellectual and moral, not geographic–of your Continent.)
…you probably don’t realise that a european is exposed from birth to many, many different cultures and languages compared to the average american. We are therefore better at accepting differences and do not need to maintain the illusion that we’re somehow better than the rest [i’m not sure about the french though]…
…
And this is where you are wrong.
(Not in the generalization about the French. What is it that my Montana friend said about Europe? The German thinks he commands the place, the Frenchman thinks he has been deprived of his rightful place, the Englishman thinks that he owns the place, and the American? He doesn’t give a god-damn what anyone thinks.)
You are wrong, and, although I do not intend to personally insult you, ephrem (because very often you write reasonably), but you display here the blinded, fettered and confined group-think that afflicts Western Europe.
I will quote the Duke of Wellington, “If I were born in a barn that would not make me a horse.” Just being born in Europe, proximate to language and “culture” does not mean that one actually has original and creative thought, leave alone independent opinion, and something called tolerance. If you need proof, cast your gaze south across the border, the land of Welington’s triumph, where the 2 dominant cultures cannot tolerate each other after 179 years of union. Or look into the recent history of just about any national minority, from Basque, to Catalan, to Northern League, to …
Chushin above makes a joke about his own experience, but it is not at all unusual. Where I work, I am compelled to use a special phone to translate among ninety–yes, 90–languages and dialects common within a 25 mile radius. (Oh, that’s 40 km.) And let me guarantee you, that each community wants to preserve what they value most and contribute it to the American culture.
What marks the US, I contend, is tolerance, and conflicts, and resolutions, and intolerance…and progress. What my extended stay in Europe taught me–what characterized Western Europe–is intolerance, the selected burial of history for the “sake of the polity,” and a relentless, soul-less homogenization of culture, and self-exculpatory amorality, directed from Brussels and Paris and Berlin, by a coven of “wise men:” soi-disant intellectuals, bureaucrats and hangers-on.
Yes, I know, that is what you think of the US: soul-less and homogenized. Maybe so, but not if you attend Chushin’s family reunion, or if you care to browse through a bookstore. There is no culture more self-examining, self-critical and self-damning and regretful. If there be a European history as self-critical in the last 30 years–please, do recommend it to me. Shame is as American, and as public, as patriotism.
If you, or Cockney Blue above in a typical condescension, see patriotism as an immature and evil attribute, you have skimmed the only most superficial layers of American thought; you do not understand the public psychic turbulence that is our historical heritage, celebrated here only modestly.[/quote]
…very well written post Doc, very eloquent, and very much besides the point. On a personal level, people are people everywhere you go on this planet. There’s little difference between what motivates them, and that is the point i’m trying to make.
The ways through which the american populace is motivated by their government does not differ in principle from how large masses of people were motivated in the past by oppressive regimes, but because it is covered in a nicely colored pastiche of freedom, democracy and the persuit of happiness somehow atrocity and warmongering have become acceptable to you [general you].
This path of blindly following state sanctioned murder, justified by patriotic sentiments and appeals to emotion, does not lead to a lasting resolution of age old problems we’ve faced as a species for so long, it only perpetuates them.
You’d probably call that idealistic and out of touch, but also in this case Newton’s law applies: for every action there’s a equal and opposite reaction. As time goes by, who threw the first punch becomes arbitrary, but shouldn’t there come a time when someone has to say, “enough is enough”?
