Terrific piece by a British commentator, and I think he is right. Things appear a lot different these days on the surface, but at its core, America is not far removed from its roots. We are a stable democracy rooted in an idealistic worldview that is not easily understood from abroad and should not be too quickly dismissed.
I spent the better part of a year in England and Europe. Europeans do scoff at Americans. It's as if the British still sting at their loss of global influence and can't believe they lost it to the likes of us. They consider us nouveau-riche, uncultured, arrogant, naive. To me they seemed like aristocrats without the land, hanging on to what was and feeling superior based just on a feeling of superiority. I found it all kind of stupid and pointless, and I validated their stereotypes by telling them that Americans may not be able to locate the English Channel on a map or name a British poet, but we kicked your ass sure enough. It's an argument that Americans understand. We are willing to fight, and when we fight, we fight to win. I think and hope that still defines America. We maintain our superiority through lack of subtlety, and that's precisely what I like, and the left hates, about Bush.
Even this insightful commentator can't grasp that we don't really give a rip about "winning hearts and minds." When someone shoots at us, we crush them like a bug, as we ought. That's not being a bully, it's defending liberty. You are free to shoot at us, and we are free to eliminate threats to our safety.
We are inclined, in our snobbish way, to dismiss the Americans as a new and vulgar people, whose civilisation has hardly risen above the level of cowboys and Indians. Yet the United States of America is actually the oldest republic in the world, with a constitution that is one of the noblest works of man. When one strips away the distracting symbols of modernity - motor cars, skyscrapers, space rockets, microchips, junk food - one finds an essentially 18th-century country. While Europe has engaged in the headlong and frankly rather immature pursuit of novelty - how many constitutions have the nations of Europe been through in this time? - the Americans have held to the ideals enunciated more than 200 years ago by their founding fathers.
Thomas Jefferson warned that the tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots. To the Americans, the idea that freedom and democracy exact a cost in blood is second nature.
The Americans are prepared to use force in pursuit of what they regard as noble aims. It is yet another respect in which they are rather old-fashioned. They are patriots who venerate their nation and their flag.
The idea has somehow gained currency in Britain that America is an essentially peaceful nation. Quite how this notion took root, I do not know. Perhaps we were unduly impressed by the protesters against the Vietnam war.
It is an idea that cannot survive a visit to the National Museum of American History in Washington, where one is informed that the "price of freedom" is over and over again paid in blood.
The Americans' tactics in Iraq, and their sanction for Israel's tactics in Lebanon, have given rise to astonishment and anger in Europe. It may well be that those tactics are counter-productive, and that the Americans and Israelis need to take a different approach to these ventures if they are ever to have any hope of winning hearts and minds.
But when the Americans speak of freedom, we should not imagine, in our cynical and worldly-wise way, that they are merely using that word as a cloak for realpolitik. They are not above realpolitik, but they also mean what they say.
These formidable people think freedom is so valuable that it is worth dying for.
1 comment:
Sometimes it takes an Englishman to get to the heart of Americanism.
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