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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 550
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WCL 550 March 2007
An American puzzle
The Guardian newspaper prints today a self-questioning article by an American who asks, essentially why she and her fellow-citizens accepted, not without question, but without revolt, an administration that has trampled on all the things that have in the past made the U.S. a beacon of hope for democrats and lovers of human freedom. Why, she asks, have they permitted, despite protesting and demonstrating against the militarist policies and atrocities such as the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay to continue?
The answer must lie in American history and it is not only for U.S. citizens to suggest answers. The mistakes and crimes of the Bush and other administrations affect world citizens of every country. They can lead, with the help of Tony Blair and other witting and unwitting law-breakers, to outbreaks of violence that will culminate in another world war. Nothing will prevent that, save the imminent threat of global environmental catastrophe that will remove the capacity of our current regimes to continue with their policies of violence and war-making.
The writer believes that the United States is now awakening to the enormity of its folly in supporting Bush and co for so long. But she admits that the greater question is why he was allowed for so long to defy American values and was supported in such unconstitutional policies as the Patriot Act and the maintenance of Guantanamo prison camp. Why have the Democrats and other like-minded opponents now stirring been so supine until recently? A vital question.
World citizens should have no great difficulty in analysing a good part of the malady. The United States has inculcated in its citizens a belief in and a love of America as a land that must always be right and therefore there is a duty to support it at all times. But instead of to the principles that the country was founded upon, the devotion has been given, via the flag, to the institution of the federal state. That originally meant the federation but as time has worn on and the imperial presidency has taken a firmer grip, it has come to mean the emerging nation-state.
Behind the military and financial power now wielded by the Bush administration is the even more dangerous ideology of nationalism, graduating as is the wont of such particularist ideas, into imperialism. The most disastrous exemplar of this trend was the Nazi regime in Germany, where nationalism, fostered and nurtured by a military tradition of three centuries, finally led to the ruin of Europe and the death there of twenty million people. The post-war window-dressing of the United Nations left untouched the basic delusion that a world of competing nationalisms could still be brought to peace. We are still suffering from that misdirection of political endeavour and collective mania.
As the pigs in Animal Farm turned into their human oppressors, so the United States that began as a total contrast to the kingdoms of 1776, is a federation has become one among many nation-states. And since its founders laid the basis for a great and effective state, so it has evolved into the 'primus inter pares' the most powerful and thus the most dangerous of all the nation-states. Once in the grip of the neo-cons, the 21st century imperialists par excellence, the United States, under guise of spreading democracy and ideas of freedom, is now arousing large parts of the world against its version of democracy.
So the reply to the agonized self-questioning must be - you cannot maintain the ideology of separatism, with national groups demanding exclusive loyalty, and yet produce a civilized world. If we persist in allowing nation-states, like the dinosaurs of old, to run the world, with their leaders strutting and shouting their national slogans, we shall never be able to face the disasters of global warming or any other challenges of such gravity. Even now, when the imminence of those threats are admitted on every side, the main policies of the nation-state governments are still focused on the traditional goals of independence and state power.
Our nation-states compete for anything worth having; they sell destructive weapons to all and sundry. They support spies and saboteurs to frustrate and impede their rivals. They institute trade wars and economic competition that are hardly moderated by the spasmodic efforts to come to terms with the effects of their own self-seeking. And they corrupt their populations by selling o the people the ideas of their own integrity and difference which are either illusory or exist in spite of their own criminal and aggressive behaviour.
Since 1945, when leaders pledged at the U.N. to create a peaceful world we have had either cold war or incessant minor conflicts. The attack on Iraq and subsequent disasters show that they are intent on continuing on the path to ruin. Only an addiction to nationalism can keep the people supporting such a headlong rush to extinction.
John Roberts
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