From Dave Farber’s Interesting People [IP] mailing list. Conservative or liberal, if you’re an American, you’re not imagining things if you suspect that there’s something amiss in our great country. Sometimes it takes a (slightly acerbic) commentary from distant shores to make one realize how quickly things have changed.
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interesting perspective, not for everyones tastes, from an ally… published by “Vorwarts” in Germany on June 8. A very interesting perspective from outside the U.S.
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What Is Happening in America?
By Eliot Weinberger
In the Western democracies in the last fifty years, we have grown accustomed to governments whose policies on specific issues may be good or bad, but which essentially institute incremental changes to the status quo. The major exceptions have been Thatcher and Reagan, but even their programs of dismantling systems of social welfare seem, in retrospect, mild compared to what is happening in the United States under George Bush– or more exactly, the ruling junta that tells Bush what to do and say.
It is unquestionably the most radical government in modern American history, one whose ideology and actions have become so pervasive, and are so unquestionably mirrored by the mass media here, that the population seems to have forgotten what “normal” is.
George Bush is the first unelected President of the United States, installed by a right-wing Supreme Court in a kind of judicial coup d’etat. He is the first to actively subvert one of the pillars of American democracy: the separation of church and state. There are now daily prayer meetings and Bible study groups in every branch of the government, and religious organizations are being given funds to take over educational and welfare programs that have always been the domain of the state.
Bush is the first president to invoke the specific “Jesus Christ” rather than an ecumenical “God,” and he has surrounded himself with evangelical Christians, including his Attorney General, who attends a church where he talks in tongues.
It is the first administration to openly declare a policy of unilateral aggression, a “Pax Americana” where the presence of allies (whether England or Bulgaria) is agreeable but unimportant; where international treaties no longer apply to the United States; and where– for the first time in history– this country reserves the right to non-defensive,”pre-emptive” strikes against any nation on earth, for whatever reason it declares.
It is the first– since the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II– to enact special laws for a specific ethnic group. Non-citizen young Muslim men are now required to register and subject themselves to interrogation. Many hundreds have been arrested and held without trial or access to legal assistance– a violation of another pillar of American democracy: habeas corpus. Many have been taken from their families and deported on minor technical immigration violations; the whereabouts of many others are still unknown. And, in Guant
here’s an update on this article:
Dave, this is not a perspective from outside the US. “Vorwarts” is the official magazine of the German Social-Democratic party, but this piece was written by Eliot Weinberger, an American writer living in NYC. It shows right from the opening statement that the majority of modern governments “institute incremental changes to the status quo”. Many in Europe will contend that the European Union is in fact a radical change. Others will observe that the government of Jacques Chirac, for example, is busy with a reform program that rolls back pension rights, reduces the number of state employees, reduces taxes, and generally shares a lot with the exercices conducted by Mr. Reagan & Ms. Thatcher. In fact, the rolling back of the welfare state is happening in quite a large number of European countries. The author has an idealized view of Europe, a view from New York City. This paper is not European, but rather squarely “made in America”.
It is very difficult to speak of what is happening in America without resorting to the hyperbolic cliches
Alas, that’s the curse of the extreme left: it cannot figure out how to speak without resorting to hyperbolic cliches. Perhaps it could go the old-fashioned way and use facts instead of fabrications, but that’s just not exciting enough.