| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
28 Jan 2005 08:59:07 AM |
| Object: |
Fascist Thocracy leaving Americans behind |
While America is awash in Creationist occultism and fascism, the
rest of the world sprints ahead in science, education, and technology.
-=-
Michael Lind
Financial Times
In a second inaugural address tinged with evangelical zeal, George W. Bush
declared: "Today, America speaks anew to the peoples of the world." The
peoples of the world, however, do not seem to be listening. A new world
order is indeed emerging - but its architecture is being drafted in Asia
and Europe, at meetings to which Americans have not been invited.
Consider Asean Plus Three (APT), which unites the member countries of the
Association of Southeast Asia Nations with China, Japan and South Korea.
This group has the potential to be the world's largest trade bloc, dwarfing
the European Union and North American Free Trade Association. The deepening
ties of the APT member states represent a major diplomatic defeat for the
US, which hoped to use the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum to
limit the growth of Asian economic regionalism at American expense. In the
same way, recent moves by South American countries to bolster an economic
community represent a clear rejection of US aims to dominate a
western-hemisphere free trade zone.
Consider, as well, the EU's rapid progress toward military independence.
American protests failed to prevent the EU establishing its own military
planning agency, independent of the Nato alliance (and thus of Washington).
Europe is building up its own rapid reaction force. And despite US
resistance, the EU is developing Galileo, its own satellite network, which
will break the monopoly of the US global positioning satellite system.
The participation of China in Europe's Galileo project has alarmed the US
military. But China shares an interest with other aspiring space powers in
preventing American control of space for military and commercial uses. Even
while collaborating with Europe on Galileo, China is partnering Brazil to
launch satellites. And in an unprecedented move, China recently agreed to
host Russian forces for joint Russo-Chinese military exercises.
The US is being sidelined even in the area that Mr Bush identified in last
week's address as America's mission: the promotion of democracy and human
rights. The EU has devoted far more resources to consolidating democracy in
post-communist Europe than has the US. By contrast, under Mr Bush, the US
hypocritically uses the promotion of democracy as the rationale for
campaigns against states it opposes for strategic reasons. Washington
denounces tyranny in Iran but tolerates it in Pakistan. In Iraq, the goal
of democratisation was invoked only after the invasion, which was justified
earlier by claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and
was collaborating with al-Qaeda.
Nor is American democracy a shining example to mankind. The present
one-party rule in the US has been produced in part by the artificial
redrawing of political districts to favour Republicans, reinforcing the
domination of money in American politics. America's judges -- many of whom
will be appointed by Mr Bush -- increasingly behave as partisan political
activists in black robes. America's antiquated winner-take-all electoral
system has been abandoned by most other democracies for more inclusive
versions of proportional representation.
In other areas of global moral and institutional reform, the US today is a
follower rather than a leader. Human rights? Europe has banned the death
penalty and torture, while the US is a leading practitioner of execution.
Under Mr Bush, the US has constructed an international military gulag in
which the torture of suspects has frequently occurred. The international
rule of law? For generations, promoting international law in collaboration
with other nations was a US goal. But the neoconservatives who dominate
Washington today mock the very idea of international law. The next US
attorney general will be the White House counsel who scorned the Geneva
Conventions as obsolete.
A decade ago, American triumphalists mocked those who argued that the world
was becoming multipolar, rather than unipolar. Where was the evidence of
balancing against the US, they asked. Today the evidence of foreign
co-operation to reduce American primacy is everywhere -- from the
increasing importance of regional trade blocs that exclude the US to
international space projects and military exercises in which the US is
conspicuous by its absence.
It is true that the US remains the only country capable of projecting
military power throughout the world. But unipolarity in the military
sphere, narrowly defined, is not preventing the rapid development of
multipolarity in the geopolitical and economic arenas -- far from it. And
the other great powers are content to let the US waste blood and treasure
on its doomed attempt to recreate the post-first world war British imperium
in the Middle East.
That the rest of the world is building institutions and alliances that shut
out the US should come as no surprise. The view that American leaders can
be trusted to use a monopoly of military and economic power for the good of
humanity has never been widely shared outside of the US. The trend toward
multipolarity has probably been accelerated by the truculent unilateralism
of the Bush administration, whose motto seems to be that of the Hollywood
mogul: "Include me out."
In recent memory, nothing could be done without the US. Today, however,
practically all new international institution-building of any long-term
importance in global diplomacy and trade occurs without American
participation.
In 1998 Madeleine Albright, then US secretary of state, said of the U.S.:
"We are the indispensable nation." By backfiring, the unilateralism of Mr
Bush has proven her wrong. The US, it turns out, is a dispensable nation.
Europe, China, Russia, Latin America and other regions and nations are
quietly taking measures whose effect if not sole purpose will be to cut
America down to size.
Ironically, the US, having won the cold war, is adopting the strategy that
led the Soviet Union to lose it: hoping that raw military power will be
sufficient to intimidate other great powers alienated by its belligerence.
To compound the irony, these other great powers are drafting the blueprints
for new international institutions and alliances. That is what the US did
during and after the second world war.
But that was a different America, led by wise and constructive statesmen
like Dean Acheson, the secretary of state who wrote of being "present at
the creation." The bullying approach of the Bush administration has ensured
that the US will not be invited to take part in designing the international
architecture of Europe and Asia in the 21st century. This time, the US is
absent at the creation.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2005/1/25/191022/863
---
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Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
.
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