[Peace-discuss] Chomsky arguments.

[C. G. Estabrook]

It wasn't easy, Mort. It took the new Pearl Harbor that the Neocons were
praying for, and still there were the most massive anti-war demonstrations
in US history *before* the war was launched.

You remember as well as I do that there was nothing like that before
Kennedy invaded Vietnam, and the war against Vietnam was far worse than
anything we've done to Iraq so far (roughly 50 times worse, in terms of
casualties). And it took the better part of a decade, not 18 months, for
most Americans to come to agree that that aggression was a "mistake."

The characteristics you adduce are surely there -- they're certainly
encouraged -- but you omit an important one: fear.  From the first
European immigration, Americans have been a remarkably fearful people, and
our rulers have understood how that can be played upon. A more recent
example:

	"In early 1947 President Harry Truman was hunting --
unsuccessfully -- for a way to persuade a war-weary Congress to give him
$400 million in economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey. At a
crucial White House meeting with congressional leaders, Undersecretary of
State Dean Acheson transformed the terms of debate: Only the United States
could stop Soviet communism's drive to dominate the world, and Greece and
Turkey were vital pieces of this grand strategy.
	"The powerful Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, R-Mich., liked the argument,
and told Truman that the president could get his aid program if he would
'scare hell out of the country.' Truman obliged with a fateful speech
recasting world affairs into an endless global battle between freedom and
tyranny, asserting American responsibility 'to support free peoples'
resisting 'armed minorities' or 'outside pressures' everywhere in the
world. [Sound familiar? --CGE] Two weeks after this announcement of the
'Truman Doctrine,' the administration instituted a loyalty program for
federal employees. The Cold War was on in earnest.
	"The strategy worked. For decades, Congress, supported by public
opinion, gave presidents everything they asked for, as long as it was
labeled 'defense' or 'national security.' And Americans learned to live in
and with fear. Fear of communism, fear of nuclear war, fear of reducing
military spending, fear of insurrections in small countries all over the
globe, fear of China, fear of 'aliens,' fear of 'subversives.'"

Of course, a society founded on two of the greatest crimes in human
history -- the destruction of the the native Americans and the enslavement
of the Africans -- may have a lot to be afraid of.  One needn't be too
psychoanalytic to recognize what Tacitus observed, "proprium humani
ingenii est odisse quem laeseris": it's human nature to hate those you've
injured -- and fear them or their agents, as Jefferson did when he wrote,
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his
justice cannot sleep forever." A peculiar, deep-seated fear, unknown to
other nations, may be the essential American characteristic.  Our rulers
have certainly acted as if it was so.

Regards, Carl

On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Morton K.Brussel wrote:

> It may be true that now, in retrospect, most Americans agree that the
> aggression in Iraq was a mistake (or, perhaps better, not the
> aggression, but the incompetence and shortsightedness of the
> aggression), but at the time, or shortly thereafter, they supported
> the war (same for the first Gulf war and in Yugoslavia, etc.), they
> bought into the propaganda so easily. Of course, one can say that they
> were deviously manipulated, but I have the sense that they were too
> ready to be manipulated by an education which is overly proud of the
> imperialist history of the United States, by a certain nationalist
> fundamentalism, and by a lack of empathy with, a dismissal of, the
> downtrodden of the world. U.S. citizens, generalizing of course,
> haven't suffered enough recently. Probably one of the reasons the
> Europeans are more appalled at our actions is that their suffering
> from war is still not so remote.
>     Part of our cultural heritage is, despite Vietnam, triumphalism,
> "America uber alles". A sense that the almighty is conflated with us,
> i.e. Power, corrupts
.
> 
> But yes, we have to work to change all this.
> 
> mkb
> 
>