Ysanne Isard
Feb 20th, 2002, 05:04:27 PM
(On the risk of angering some here by posting this, I post it anyway. I found it an interesting piece of writing, and echoing quite well the feelings and thoughts of many people over here in Europe - so I just had to translate it. Enjoy! :p)
The furrows on his forehead have grown deeper, the foolish grin has vanished. Looking serious, almost grim, George W. Bush just gave his first report about the nation's situation: "Our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers." Then he made a small break and triumphantly looked around himself: "Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger." Delegates and ministers, who had assembled for the ritualistic celebration in the Capitol, could not keep to their seats. 77 times, every 40 seconds, they interrupted Bush's war speech with standing ovations.
When and where the US army will strike next is not yet certain. But the "Axis of evil" - North Korea, Iran, and Iraq - had better be prepared. Who ever will risk being behind the next terrorist attack can be sure - the United States will strike back like they did in Afghanistan. No one can stand up against the super power that is the US.
The United States of America are the number one in any area - militarily, economically, technically and culturally. It has the highest defense budget - bigger than that of Russia, Japan, China, England, Germany, India, Pakistan and France together. It has military bases in over 30 nations. The American economy dominates the world. The USA encompass only little more than four percent of the world population, yet they produce 30 percent of all trade goods. Five of the ten biggest companies of the planet are US-owned. The dollar rules over the world of finance. "When Wall Street coughs, the European stock exchanges get pneumonia," is a common saying of the brokers in Frankfurt and London.
Science and research are on a level Europe can only dream of. In the past 50 years the Americans received the Nobel Prize for Physics 66 times, for Medicine 68 times, for Chemistry 42 times. And three out of four German Nobel prize winners of the past years are doing their research in the USA. It is not the money that makes America so attractive - it's the freedom. Here there is none of this "bureaucracy which keeps throwing you a club between your feet", says the German researcher Rudolf Jaenisch who teaches at the renowned Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not even horrendous college fees can deter anyone: per year, US universities draw half a million of the best students of the entire world to them.
And the cultural supremacy is overwhelming, too. American books, movies and TV series dominate the bestseller lists, cinemas and TV screens of the world. 44 of the 50 most successful films of all times in German cinemas came from Hollywood. The same mob which burned US flags in the streets of Karachi "is happily watching pirated copies of "Rambo” in the evenings", a radio reporter in Pakistan was wondering.
"The greatest country of the world" (Bush) has changed since September 11th. On that fateful Tuesday a 225-year-old myth collapsed - the belief in America's invincibility. And ever since, it reaches as far as into Bush's cabinet - the question of which policy the Superpower should adopt in the future. To rule over the other countries like the Imperium Romanum once did? To co-operate with the rest of the world? Or should the Americans withdraw from international politics and only interfere again if their own vital interests are touched upon?
Every option is being discussed without consulting the majority of the population - maybe even without consulting the people's representatives. Foreign politics don't interest the Americans much. What kind of enormous effects "the modernisation of the world under American leadership" has, according to the historian Paul Kennedy, is something the architects of this domination think about very rarely.
A survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington recently showed "the huge gap which exists between the opinion leaders in the USA and other parts of the world". Just 18 percent of Americans questioned believe US politics are one of the causes for the terror attacks - twice the number of West Europeans are convinced of it, 60 percent even in Asia and 76 percent in the Islamic Nations. A majority of Americans is of the opinion the USA would "do much good" - that is the same as what 20 percent think in West Europe and the Islamic Nations; in South America, where the US influence is at its heaviest, it is even a mere 12 percent.
No other civilised people is living as satisfied and confident in its own world as the US-Americans. Only a few speak a language other than their native one. The magazine "National Geographic" found out in a survey that more than three quarters of the people asked can't find Japan on a map of the world; 20 percent didn't even know where their own country was. "World Series" is the title of the final game of the US Baseball Championship, yet it is merely the leading teams of the two US leagues playing against each other.
"The attacks of September 11 have made it all too clear that we can not ignore what goes on elsewhere in the world," complained the Glam-Magazine "Vanity Fair". The American Media had "restricted its foreign coverage by almost 70 to 80 percent in the last 15 to 20 years". Their argument for it: No one would be interested in it anyway, since it did not concern the Americans. The 11th of September has brought them painfully back to ground zero.
But it is not only Joe Smith in front of his tv set in Iowa who is badly informed. The fraction leader of the Republicans in Congress, the Texan Dick Armey, boasted a few years ago: "I was once in Europe - I don't need to go there again." He corrected himself later, when he "discovered that there is a world full of people out there who are worried about us Americans who don't have any direct experience of the world outside of our own borders". Many delegates are proud of the fact that they do not own a passport.
Foreign nations are often only noticed when US soldiers go to fight there. The coverage of the news channel Fox TV apparently hits the nerve centre of the public. Fox is the megaphone of the Couch-Rambos; on some days it already surpassed its biggest competitor, CNN. When Fox staff members report from Afghanistan, they only refer to Osama bin Laden by "dirt bag" or "monster". When the American Taliban-fighter John Walker Lindh was imprisoned, the "New York Post" ran as its headline: "Looks like a rat, talks like a rat, smells like a rat, hides like a rat!" Then the readers could vote online: "Is Walker a traitor?" The result was inevitable logic: Put him on the chair.
In the weeks following September 11th the famous composure of the Americans was occasionally badly mauled. The delegate Barbara Lee, from Berkeley, California, who had been the only one in the House of Delegates voting against Bush's crusade, needed a police escort. In a museum in Houston the FBI arrived because an anonymous caller had reported "anti-American art" to be shown there. Exhibited was a chalk drawing which criticised Bush's environmental politics.
"Nothing is more annoying than this destructive patriotism of the Americans", wrote one of the best experts of the country, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, 160 years ago. In the war months following September 11th that patriotism occasionally took on hysterical traits; a good example for that being when Bush's press-speaker Ari Fleischer warned the intellectuals "to be careful of what they said or did". The writers Susan Sontag was attacked in an even more aggressive way: "I suggested that we should rethink our foreign policies. Is that such a crazy idea? I thought we were a contentious democracy, but increasingly it seems as if we were incredibly conformist and afraid of criticism."
Which strategy the world power should adopt after the attacks is a matter much disputed internally. The Right Wing, led by Deputy Minister of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, is viewing the whole Afghanistan matter as an acceleration of its own interests and would love to strike at Iraq, too. If the Allied Forces would go along with that or not, that doesn't really interest them. Ten years ago - back in the days when Bush's father was still president - Wolfowitz, as a political thinker in the Pentagon, drew up a controversial strategy of domination. According to that, America would have to "discourage any attempts made by other advanced industrial nations to challenge our leadership or even just play a bigger role regionally or globally." Since the secret paper was passed on to the "New York Times" in 1991, it has given wings to the dreams of the Neo-Imperialists. What they have in mind is a "new Empire" which provides for peace and order on a chaotic planet - played by US rules.
September 11th had proved that more power and interference would not have made the USA more secure, is the argument against that view. Therefore it would be best to stop playing at policing the entire world. For example the Gulf Region: Why should the USA spend more than 100 billion dollars every year on it, even though it only got one fourth of the oil from that region? Shouldn't that explosive job be left to those who were depending more strongly on the Arabic oil, like Europe and Japan? Absurd, is what the opposing voices say about this theory. Europe was unable to keep peace on its own continent. A withdrawal of the USA and its forces would only serve to create greater chaos.
Before being elected Bush had promised that the USA under his leadership would "tread in more humble ways: If we do not want to be seen as the ugly American any longer, we need to stop telling the whole world: We do it like this, and that's how you should do it, too."
But 6 months later the "New York Times" already criticised Bush, saying he had displayed a true "arrogance and disregard in the field of international co-operation". One after the other, Bush quit, sabotaged or broke out of contracts because they did not serve "American interests" - like the Kyoto-agreement which should reduce the output of the Greenhouse-gas Carbon Dioxide. The ABM-treaty with Russia, which limits the amount of intercontinental missiles, was quit, because it restricts the build-up of a US anti-missiles defense shield. The Nuclear Test Stop treaty is as good as dead, the Anti-Landmines-treaty was rejected, the Small-Arms agreement was worked down to a shallow compromise, because Bush didn't want to scare away the arms lobby with its generous donations.
Last December, while Washington was being terrorised by Anthrax-attacks, Bush broke out of the Bio Weapons agreement, because it didn’t have enough bite. In reality the US pharmacological industry didn't want to have to subject itself to the control of international inspectors. The USA also rejects the International Criminal Court for War Criminals - they do not want members of the US forces to be placed before international judges.
The criticism of the Europeans about all that self-glorification did not seem to make any kind of impact on the Americans for the longest time. But in recent days the tone on both side of the Atlantic has become more irritable. When the USA lost her seat in the UN Human Rights Committee because of an intrigue in May of last year, a commentator let off steam in the "Washington Post": "Europe's ruling classes will never forgive us for creating a world in which they do not rule over anything more than handmade cheese." Because Europe recently criticised the American plans to sentence terrorists in military tribunals, the "Wall Street Journal" made fun of the "moral blustering" of the old continent: "Hopefully it'll be enough to conquer Omaha Beach on their own the next time."
The Americans are tired of being held responsible for every ill on the world, especially by the Europeans. Many conflicts they inherited from the colonial powers of the old continent. If they lead the Gulf War with a mandate from the United Nations, then it is evidence of how the USA manipulates the UN for her own goals. If they lead a war without a UN mandate, like in Afghanistan, then it is proof for the disregard of the world organisation. If they do not interfere, like in Rwanda, they get accused of cold-bloodedly watching the genocide without lifting a finger. If they do interfere, like in Somalia, they are seen as the arrogant world police. And no one in Washington has forgotten how miserably the Europeans failed at keeping Yugoslavia from breaking out in civil war.
America is convinced more than ever before that its own playing rules of capitalism could save the world from poverty. The factors that had helped make it so wealthy itself – democracy, free trade and a harsh competition – was also the perfect recipe for everyone else. But the rest of the world can’t help but perceive the process of globalisation becoming more and more a process of Americanisation, tailored after the robber-knights rules of the US corporations.
The biggest case of bankruptcy in US history, the case of the Energy tycoon Enron – who is closely associated with the Bush government – is a perfect example of the greed of the wealthy. The top employees knew exactly what kind of a scam the high rate of their company’s shares was, and pushed them off as long as the rate was still sky-high. The simple employees, however, could only rid themselves of their shares when they were already practically worthless. Thousands lost their old-age securities and pensions. It took months before the scandalous case was turned into a hot topic in the news, because Enron had bought so many politicians with his donations that “it would be easier to ask who didn’t receive any money from them rather than the other way round”, commented “National Public Radio”. 71 of the one hundred senators were found to be on Enron’s list of donations.
It’s an American paradox: time again the self-named Exemplary Nation undermines exactly those values for which it likes to fight so valiantly with fire and iron. In what other country would it have been possible for a man to be made president if he had held half a million votes less than his opponent – and even those counted out like in some banana republic? Is it the ideal model for the rest of the world, if terrorists are put before military tribunals which deny them even those basic rights which would be granted to any common mass murderer? The “Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights” in Washington asked: “When countries like Peru, Egypt and Colombia do something like that, our Foreign Ministry protests. What are we going to tell them in the future?”
Is the American way of distributing incomes a good example? In the last three decades the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of the population has grown steadily, more so than in any other industrial nation. Almost half of the enormous growth in incomes went to the very thin class of top earners – a mere one percent of employees. And to the poor countries the USA have been making promises of “wealth never before experienced” if they agree to dance to their neo-liberal tune, “but the promise hasn’t been kept, and the countries only got poverty such as they had never experienced”, wrote the Nobel Prize-winner for Economy, Joseph Stiglitz.
The urge to increase their net yields is something the Americans have always liked to connect to missionary zealousness. Whereas Europe has become worldlier since the Second World War, Religion plays an increasingly important role in US politics. The Republican Party is being dominated by its fundamental wing. “The new leader of the religious Right in America is called George W. Bush,” commented the “Washington Post” recently. With the fury of a man come lately to his faith (Bush won the victory over his alcoholism at the age of forty, with the help of the televangelist Billy Graham), he is now pursuing world politics with the bible in his hand.
The love for religious zealotry and for patriotism “isn’t truly new”, wrote the “New York Times”, “we are a Nation which created itself and we are fiercely defensive of our master piece. One isn’t American just by blood or by ancestry.” One of the greatest experts of the USA put it this way: “Time and time again the inhabitants of the United States are told they are the only religious, enlightened and truly free people on this world. They have an immensely high opinion of themselves and aren’t far from believing that they are a species apart from the human race.” So Toqueville wrote 50 years after the Declaration of Independence. The same still applies now.
Stern Magazine - Claus Lutterbeck / Co-operation: Michael Streck
The furrows on his forehead have grown deeper, the foolish grin has vanished. Looking serious, almost grim, George W. Bush just gave his first report about the nation's situation: "Our nation is at war, our economy is in recession, and the civilized world faces unprecedented dangers." Then he made a small break and triumphantly looked around himself: "Yet the state of our Union has never been stronger." Delegates and ministers, who had assembled for the ritualistic celebration in the Capitol, could not keep to their seats. 77 times, every 40 seconds, they interrupted Bush's war speech with standing ovations.
When and where the US army will strike next is not yet certain. But the "Axis of evil" - North Korea, Iran, and Iraq - had better be prepared. Who ever will risk being behind the next terrorist attack can be sure - the United States will strike back like they did in Afghanistan. No one can stand up against the super power that is the US.
The United States of America are the number one in any area - militarily, economically, technically and culturally. It has the highest defense budget - bigger than that of Russia, Japan, China, England, Germany, India, Pakistan and France together. It has military bases in over 30 nations. The American economy dominates the world. The USA encompass only little more than four percent of the world population, yet they produce 30 percent of all trade goods. Five of the ten biggest companies of the planet are US-owned. The dollar rules over the world of finance. "When Wall Street coughs, the European stock exchanges get pneumonia," is a common saying of the brokers in Frankfurt and London.
Science and research are on a level Europe can only dream of. In the past 50 years the Americans received the Nobel Prize for Physics 66 times, for Medicine 68 times, for Chemistry 42 times. And three out of four German Nobel prize winners of the past years are doing their research in the USA. It is not the money that makes America so attractive - it's the freedom. Here there is none of this "bureaucracy which keeps throwing you a club between your feet", says the German researcher Rudolf Jaenisch who teaches at the renowned Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Not even horrendous college fees can deter anyone: per year, US universities draw half a million of the best students of the entire world to them.
And the cultural supremacy is overwhelming, too. American books, movies and TV series dominate the bestseller lists, cinemas and TV screens of the world. 44 of the 50 most successful films of all times in German cinemas came from Hollywood. The same mob which burned US flags in the streets of Karachi "is happily watching pirated copies of "Rambo” in the evenings", a radio reporter in Pakistan was wondering.
"The greatest country of the world" (Bush) has changed since September 11th. On that fateful Tuesday a 225-year-old myth collapsed - the belief in America's invincibility. And ever since, it reaches as far as into Bush's cabinet - the question of which policy the Superpower should adopt in the future. To rule over the other countries like the Imperium Romanum once did? To co-operate with the rest of the world? Or should the Americans withdraw from international politics and only interfere again if their own vital interests are touched upon?
Every option is being discussed without consulting the majority of the population - maybe even without consulting the people's representatives. Foreign politics don't interest the Americans much. What kind of enormous effects "the modernisation of the world under American leadership" has, according to the historian Paul Kennedy, is something the architects of this domination think about very rarely.
A survey by the Pew Research Center in Washington recently showed "the huge gap which exists between the opinion leaders in the USA and other parts of the world". Just 18 percent of Americans questioned believe US politics are one of the causes for the terror attacks - twice the number of West Europeans are convinced of it, 60 percent even in Asia and 76 percent in the Islamic Nations. A majority of Americans is of the opinion the USA would "do much good" - that is the same as what 20 percent think in West Europe and the Islamic Nations; in South America, where the US influence is at its heaviest, it is even a mere 12 percent.
No other civilised people is living as satisfied and confident in its own world as the US-Americans. Only a few speak a language other than their native one. The magazine "National Geographic" found out in a survey that more than three quarters of the people asked can't find Japan on a map of the world; 20 percent didn't even know where their own country was. "World Series" is the title of the final game of the US Baseball Championship, yet it is merely the leading teams of the two US leagues playing against each other.
"The attacks of September 11 have made it all too clear that we can not ignore what goes on elsewhere in the world," complained the Glam-Magazine "Vanity Fair". The American Media had "restricted its foreign coverage by almost 70 to 80 percent in the last 15 to 20 years". Their argument for it: No one would be interested in it anyway, since it did not concern the Americans. The 11th of September has brought them painfully back to ground zero.
But it is not only Joe Smith in front of his tv set in Iowa who is badly informed. The fraction leader of the Republicans in Congress, the Texan Dick Armey, boasted a few years ago: "I was once in Europe - I don't need to go there again." He corrected himself later, when he "discovered that there is a world full of people out there who are worried about us Americans who don't have any direct experience of the world outside of our own borders". Many delegates are proud of the fact that they do not own a passport.
Foreign nations are often only noticed when US soldiers go to fight there. The coverage of the news channel Fox TV apparently hits the nerve centre of the public. Fox is the megaphone of the Couch-Rambos; on some days it already surpassed its biggest competitor, CNN. When Fox staff members report from Afghanistan, they only refer to Osama bin Laden by "dirt bag" or "monster". When the American Taliban-fighter John Walker Lindh was imprisoned, the "New York Post" ran as its headline: "Looks like a rat, talks like a rat, smells like a rat, hides like a rat!" Then the readers could vote online: "Is Walker a traitor?" The result was inevitable logic: Put him on the chair.
In the weeks following September 11th the famous composure of the Americans was occasionally badly mauled. The delegate Barbara Lee, from Berkeley, California, who had been the only one in the House of Delegates voting against Bush's crusade, needed a police escort. In a museum in Houston the FBI arrived because an anonymous caller had reported "anti-American art" to be shown there. Exhibited was a chalk drawing which criticised Bush's environmental politics.
"Nothing is more annoying than this destructive patriotism of the Americans", wrote one of the best experts of the country, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, 160 years ago. In the war months following September 11th that patriotism occasionally took on hysterical traits; a good example for that being when Bush's press-speaker Ari Fleischer warned the intellectuals "to be careful of what they said or did". The writers Susan Sontag was attacked in an even more aggressive way: "I suggested that we should rethink our foreign policies. Is that such a crazy idea? I thought we were a contentious democracy, but increasingly it seems as if we were incredibly conformist and afraid of criticism."
Which strategy the world power should adopt after the attacks is a matter much disputed internally. The Right Wing, led by Deputy Minister of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, is viewing the whole Afghanistan matter as an acceleration of its own interests and would love to strike at Iraq, too. If the Allied Forces would go along with that or not, that doesn't really interest them. Ten years ago - back in the days when Bush's father was still president - Wolfowitz, as a political thinker in the Pentagon, drew up a controversial strategy of domination. According to that, America would have to "discourage any attempts made by other advanced industrial nations to challenge our leadership or even just play a bigger role regionally or globally." Since the secret paper was passed on to the "New York Times" in 1991, it has given wings to the dreams of the Neo-Imperialists. What they have in mind is a "new Empire" which provides for peace and order on a chaotic planet - played by US rules.
September 11th had proved that more power and interference would not have made the USA more secure, is the argument against that view. Therefore it would be best to stop playing at policing the entire world. For example the Gulf Region: Why should the USA spend more than 100 billion dollars every year on it, even though it only got one fourth of the oil from that region? Shouldn't that explosive job be left to those who were depending more strongly on the Arabic oil, like Europe and Japan? Absurd, is what the opposing voices say about this theory. Europe was unable to keep peace on its own continent. A withdrawal of the USA and its forces would only serve to create greater chaos.
Before being elected Bush had promised that the USA under his leadership would "tread in more humble ways: If we do not want to be seen as the ugly American any longer, we need to stop telling the whole world: We do it like this, and that's how you should do it, too."
But 6 months later the "New York Times" already criticised Bush, saying he had displayed a true "arrogance and disregard in the field of international co-operation". One after the other, Bush quit, sabotaged or broke out of contracts because they did not serve "American interests" - like the Kyoto-agreement which should reduce the output of the Greenhouse-gas Carbon Dioxide. The ABM-treaty with Russia, which limits the amount of intercontinental missiles, was quit, because it restricts the build-up of a US anti-missiles defense shield. The Nuclear Test Stop treaty is as good as dead, the Anti-Landmines-treaty was rejected, the Small-Arms agreement was worked down to a shallow compromise, because Bush didn't want to scare away the arms lobby with its generous donations.
Last December, while Washington was being terrorised by Anthrax-attacks, Bush broke out of the Bio Weapons agreement, because it didn’t have enough bite. In reality the US pharmacological industry didn't want to have to subject itself to the control of international inspectors. The USA also rejects the International Criminal Court for War Criminals - they do not want members of the US forces to be placed before international judges.
The criticism of the Europeans about all that self-glorification did not seem to make any kind of impact on the Americans for the longest time. But in recent days the tone on both side of the Atlantic has become more irritable. When the USA lost her seat in the UN Human Rights Committee because of an intrigue in May of last year, a commentator let off steam in the "Washington Post": "Europe's ruling classes will never forgive us for creating a world in which they do not rule over anything more than handmade cheese." Because Europe recently criticised the American plans to sentence terrorists in military tribunals, the "Wall Street Journal" made fun of the "moral blustering" of the old continent: "Hopefully it'll be enough to conquer Omaha Beach on their own the next time."
The Americans are tired of being held responsible for every ill on the world, especially by the Europeans. Many conflicts they inherited from the colonial powers of the old continent. If they lead the Gulf War with a mandate from the United Nations, then it is evidence of how the USA manipulates the UN for her own goals. If they lead a war without a UN mandate, like in Afghanistan, then it is proof for the disregard of the world organisation. If they do not interfere, like in Rwanda, they get accused of cold-bloodedly watching the genocide without lifting a finger. If they do interfere, like in Somalia, they are seen as the arrogant world police. And no one in Washington has forgotten how miserably the Europeans failed at keeping Yugoslavia from breaking out in civil war.
America is convinced more than ever before that its own playing rules of capitalism could save the world from poverty. The factors that had helped make it so wealthy itself – democracy, free trade and a harsh competition – was also the perfect recipe for everyone else. But the rest of the world can’t help but perceive the process of globalisation becoming more and more a process of Americanisation, tailored after the robber-knights rules of the US corporations.
The biggest case of bankruptcy in US history, the case of the Energy tycoon Enron – who is closely associated with the Bush government – is a perfect example of the greed of the wealthy. The top employees knew exactly what kind of a scam the high rate of their company’s shares was, and pushed them off as long as the rate was still sky-high. The simple employees, however, could only rid themselves of their shares when they were already practically worthless. Thousands lost their old-age securities and pensions. It took months before the scandalous case was turned into a hot topic in the news, because Enron had bought so many politicians with his donations that “it would be easier to ask who didn’t receive any money from them rather than the other way round”, commented “National Public Radio”. 71 of the one hundred senators were found to be on Enron’s list of donations.
It’s an American paradox: time again the self-named Exemplary Nation undermines exactly those values for which it likes to fight so valiantly with fire and iron. In what other country would it have been possible for a man to be made president if he had held half a million votes less than his opponent – and even those counted out like in some banana republic? Is it the ideal model for the rest of the world, if terrorists are put before military tribunals which deny them even those basic rights which would be granted to any common mass murderer? The “Lawyer’s Committee for Human Rights” in Washington asked: “When countries like Peru, Egypt and Colombia do something like that, our Foreign Ministry protests. What are we going to tell them in the future?”
Is the American way of distributing incomes a good example? In the last three decades the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of the population has grown steadily, more so than in any other industrial nation. Almost half of the enormous growth in incomes went to the very thin class of top earners – a mere one percent of employees. And to the poor countries the USA have been making promises of “wealth never before experienced” if they agree to dance to their neo-liberal tune, “but the promise hasn’t been kept, and the countries only got poverty such as they had never experienced”, wrote the Nobel Prize-winner for Economy, Joseph Stiglitz.
The urge to increase their net yields is something the Americans have always liked to connect to missionary zealousness. Whereas Europe has become worldlier since the Second World War, Religion plays an increasingly important role in US politics. The Republican Party is being dominated by its fundamental wing. “The new leader of the religious Right in America is called George W. Bush,” commented the “Washington Post” recently. With the fury of a man come lately to his faith (Bush won the victory over his alcoholism at the age of forty, with the help of the televangelist Billy Graham), he is now pursuing world politics with the bible in his hand.
The love for religious zealotry and for patriotism “isn’t truly new”, wrote the “New York Times”, “we are a Nation which created itself and we are fiercely defensive of our master piece. One isn’t American just by blood or by ancestry.” One of the greatest experts of the USA put it this way: “Time and time again the inhabitants of the United States are told they are the only religious, enlightened and truly free people on this world. They have an immensely high opinion of themselves and aren’t far from believing that they are a species apart from the human race.” So Toqueville wrote 50 years after the Declaration of Independence. The same still applies now.
Stern Magazine - Claus Lutterbeck / Co-operation: Michael Streck