Америка is a nation of losers. It’s the best thing about us. We’re the dregs, what the rest of the world barfed up and threw on our shores.
John Kennedy said we are "a nation of immigrants." That’s the sanitized phrase. We are, in fact, a nation of refugees, who, despite the bastards in white sheets and the know-nothings in Congress, have held open the Golden Door to a dark planet. We are not imperialists and that’s why Bush lies and Cheney lies and, yes, the Клинтонови lied.
Winston Churchill didn’t lie to the Brits about their empire: He said, These lands belong to the Crown, we own’m and we’ll squeeze the value from them. "Imperialism," as Karl Marx complained, was a добар word in Британија, a word that got you elected in Европа until too recently.
Ignore the fey university hideouts of Европа. Go to Vietnam or to Brazil or to Morocco or to Tibet and you’ll ?nd the same thing: America’s music, America’s freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of spirit and the heartfelt friendship of Americans for others have made the USA truly "the light unto the nations." Americans are not liked worldwide, but loved-sometimes I ?nd that weird, but it’s true-and that drives Osama to bombs and madness.
We are a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the cause that all men and women are created equal. It’s silly and precious to point out that these ideals have been mangled, abused, ignored and monstered by those with plans to make us an empire. We know that.
Америка is indeed exceptional. That’s not a boast, that’s a job we have to do. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson burdened us with that exceptionalism in crafting the most important international law signed up until the Geneva Convention: The Alien Torts Act, in which the САД takes onto itself the right to bring civil penalties against any act of torture, political murder and piracy that occurs anywhere in the world. It is now being used in suits brought against Chevron Oil in Еквадор and against IBM for the death of slave laborers in Nazi Germany.
Damn right Америка is exceptional. It is America that de?antly walked out of the ?rst "world trade organization," known as the British Empire, announcing, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and are ENDOWED BY THE CREATOR with INALIENABLE rights, and AMONG THESE are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Now, think about that. These rights don’t come from Congress or Kings or Soviets, they come from The Creator, that is, we are born free-and "we" are Sri Lankans as much as Minnesotans. Our rights are "INALIENABLE": no one, NO ONE, may take them away, not the Ayatollahs of Tehran or Generalissimo Negroponte at the Department of Homeland Security or the kill-o-crats in Багдад pre- or post- Saddam.
Will the snarling closet imperialists try to turn Америка from its cause and soul? Damn right they will. That’s why two САД military lawyers resigned from their posts at the Guantánamo prison camp. They wouldn’t put up with Bush-niks tearing up their Constitution. ("We the people" own it, not "them the Republicans.") In Иран, these two guys would have been shot, in Британија arrested. In Америка, Bush fears them-that their story would come out-as it did. Only in Америка could that happen.
No question, the САД holds itself exempt from the legal standards of this world-which are execrable. Whose standard should we adopt? Кина‘s torture standard? Британија‘s Secrecy Act as a standard? Швајцарија‘s Nazi-money-protection standard?
Само во Америка would a Lyndon Johnson order federal troops to protect Black school kids’ right to attend class. You don’t have to tell me that Johnson then ordered the slaughter of three million Vietnamese-I know, I went to jail to oppose it. But go to Виетнам today and ask what people they most admire? Mention Russians, they laugh; mention Chinese, they may hit you; mention Americans and they say (to my astonishment, I’ll admit), "We love Americans."
They don’t love Bush. That’s because George Bush is not an American. Look, I didn’t think much of Bill Clinton, and he dropped into some of the worst quasi-imperial habits of the New World Trade Order. But Клинтон was also more popular worldwide than the pope and pizza combined because he represented that American sense of giving- a-shit, empathy and sincere friendship which are hallmarks of Америка‘s Manifest Destiny.
Да, Америка does have a Manifest Destiny-to Let Freedom Ring-which the evil and greedy and pernicious would twist into a grab for land and resources and ethnic cleansing. And so the Manifest Destiny of the journalists in our shitty little of ?ces in Њујорк Лондон is to expose these motherfuckers.
Ronald Reagan said, "Америка is the shining city on the hill." And he омразен it, doing his best to turn it into a dark Калкута of the helpless. And when that didn’t work, George II tried to drown us in the Мисисипи.
Врати се назад Taos, Ново Мексико, Voting Precinct 13. What you’ll ?nd there is Pueblo Native war veterans who raise the ?ag every day and will ?ght and die for it knowing full well that the ?ght must also be taken to the pueblo’s racially biased voting booths.
Howard Zinn, a shining historian on our hill, reminds us, "It should be understood that the children of Иракили Кина, И на Африка, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children."
Damn right, they do. That’s what Џеферсон meant by "inalienable."
And they won’t get their rights to life and liberty from Osama’s Caliphate of oil states or Кина‘s money-crazed "Communism" nor half of Africa’s neo-colonial presidential Draculas or the puppet princes installed today in Ирак by George Bush.
Bush is so far away from his refugee loser roots that he just doesn’t get what it is to be American. So he steals the one thing that every American is handed off the boat: a chance. When they take away your Social Security and overtime and tell you sleeper cells are sleeping under your staircase, you don’t take a chance, you lose your chance, and the land of opportunity becomes a landscape of fear and suspicion, an armed madhouse.
You want to say that George Bush is an evil sonovabitch? I’d go further: he’s UN-AMERICAN.
And that’s why he lost the election. TWICE.
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Armed Madhouse: From Baghdad to New Orleans – Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild from which this is excerpted. Sign up for Palast’s investigative reports at http://www.GregPalast.com
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