[A-List] Flaws in the American way of life

[Bill Totten <shimogamo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Leader

New Statesman (May 17 2004)


What the New Statesman and several of its commentators such as John
Pilger and Ziauddin Sardar have said for the past two years is now being
accepted across the political spectrum.  The Independent's ex-editor
Andreas Whittam Smith compares George W Bush and Tony Blair to Stalin -
a comparison at which even the most dedicated anti-Americans would have
baulked until now.  In the London Evening Standard, the political
commentator Peter Oborne calls the US "a rogue state".  The editor of
Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, acknowledges that, to much of
the world, the US is "an international outlaw".  The proposition that
America had the slightest interest in the welfare of the Iraqi people,
and that a humanitarian mission could piggyback on its invasion, now
looks wholly absurd.  Attacked by Arabs on 9/11, it wanted to take the
battle to Arab territory (that they were different Arabs was neither
here nor there); alarmed by China's growing demand for oil, it wanted to
strengthen its position in the oil-rich Middle East; dedicated to
aggressive capitalism, it wanted to impose its ideology on the only
region still largely resisting it.

As always, US leaders try to present America's crimes as an aberration. 
What happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, we are told, does not
represent "American values".  Yet as Stephen Grey shows in our cover
story, the only exceptional thing is that Americans did the torturing
themselves.  More often, over the past two years, the US has used secret
planes to move prisoners to allied regimes that have more skill and
experience in torture.  Again, the deaths of hundreds in Fallujah must
be another aberration - or perhaps they didn't die at all or perhaps
they were all armed terrorists.

Why we expect so much of America is a puzzle.  During the Korean war, it
bombed the north so intensively that it ran out of targets.  In the
1960s and 1970s, it killed an estimated three million people in Vietnam,
Laos and Cambodia.  At the end of the first Gulf war, it killed
retreating Iraqi conscripts in their tens of thousands.  In Chile and
Nicaragua, it helped armed opponents of democratically elected
governments.  It has tried to squeeze the life out of Cuba for decades
and took new measures to stop Cuban Americans sending cash to their
families back home only the other day.  It opposes a host of
international treaties - on banning nuclear tests and controlling
carbon-dioxide emissions, for example - and now abjures the Geneva
Conventions as well.

How a country conducts its internal affairs is a good guide to how it
will behave abroad.  It may treat foreigners worse than it treats its
own people, but it will not treat them better.  This is why tyrants'
professions of peaceful intentions should never be trusted.  What
misleads us about the US is its commitment to many liberal values: free
speech, a free press, a robust legal system and lots of voting, for
example.  But this is also a country that incarcerates two million
(about one in every 140) of its residents - the world's highest rate of
imprisonment.  One in three black men spends some part of his life
behind bars.  Prison regimes are sometimes harsh and abuse is frequent,
as a correspondent notes on page 35.  The US also executes more than 50
people a year, some of them children.

The American way of life has many other shameful features: the
subordination of politics to business interests; the uncontrolled
possession of guns; huge social and racial inequalities; the pitiful
provision of health and welfare for poor people.  We tolerate these as
an ally's flaw, rather as we might tolerate a few drunken binges in an
otherwise amiable friend.  We do not see how they add up to a vision of
the world that America wishes to export - a way of life that seems
comfortable enough for middle-class opinion-formers, but that brings
misery to millions of others. We share, we think, "western values" and
must unite against a common enemy.  But are we sure that we and the
Americans share the same understanding of western values?  Are we sure
that the extreme Christian fundamentalists who lurk behind President
Bush, with their hair-raising attitudes to gays and abortionists, are a
lesser threat than the extreme Muslim fundamentalists who lurk behind
several Middle Eastern regimes?

Scoff if you like, and observe that the US does not behead people in
cold blood.  But who knows where its unshakeable belief in its own
righteousness may lead it?  Wiser rulers than Britain's would hedge
their bets rather more, lest they find themselves obliged to defend
worse things than beatings and sexual humiliation in a Baghdad prison. 
America, some say, is in a "pre-fascist" era. That now looks just a
little less implausible than it did a month ago.

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Copyright New Statesman 1913 - 2004


Bill Totten,  http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/