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World Focus: Sorry Jimmy, This IS the 'Real America'
Posted on Tuesday, November 15 @ 13:19:07 UTC
Topic: USA
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 By Rootsie, www.rootsie.com
This isn't the real America
By Jimmy Carter
In recent years, I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.
These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.
Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.
This from a man whose presidency at the very least coincided with unprecedented slaughter in Central America, carried out by US-trained thugs with US dollars and US marching orders in their pockets.
O yes, this country over the past 230 years has flung out oceans of words, and espoused a great many things, but the 'real America' as experienced by real people the world over is quite another place than the one Carter has enshrined in his heart.
Bottom line, it is impossible to square Thomas Jefferson's lofty Enlightenment sentiments with the reality of chattel slavery and indigenous genocide. The issue of the United States' philosophical claim to a special, 'Chosen People' version of morality was settled then and there. But how we do go on, nursing these illusions about our natural superiority.
Here is a prime example of the hubris that accompanies white supremacy. What does Carter present here but the same old list of rhetorical assumptions that have justified US imperialism from the beginning? He cites again and again the words we have spun into a national narrative whose inevitable consequence is Cheneys, Rumsfelds, and Wolfowitzes who use those very words--morality, freedom, justice, human rights --to justify a global bloodbath and pillaging campaign.
What made the US into the 'world's only super power'? Theft, plain and simple, theft shrouded by pretty words which assume our right to do whatever we feel like because our hearts are in the right place, because a benevolent deity, or the benevolent processes of evolution, made us the fittest to rule, to dictate, to prevail.
With Bush & Co. all the chickens have come home to roost: the vicious racism, xenophobia, and imperial arrogance on display for all to see. For sheer chutzpah these guys have no rivals, but they reflect nothing new or 'revolutionary'; they represent no alarming swing away from 'American values.'
This big story we like to believe about ourselves, this 'espousing' that flies in the face of the naked facts, is the problem. It's all well and good to pen an idealistic mission statement, but it's quite another thing to seek sincerely to make good on all of those lofty words.
Somebody asked me the other day, "But don't you think it's always been this way?" In fact, no I don't, but for the past 2000 years or so, probably. However, never before has the future of the human species been threatened by humans, and never before have the people on this planet had the means to view ouselves and our persistent plagues as a whole. I believe we have the ability to save ourselves, and surely the absolute imperative now exists to do so.
But not unless the United States and the rest of the West step off their imperial pedestal, acknowledge a history that has rendered them morally incapable of leading the world anywhere whatsoever, and let the people who have been the victims of all this holocaust of 'liberty, justice, and peace for all' show us how.
Share your views here:
www.rootsie.com/forum/index.php?topic=1051.0
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