Who Is Really Lying About America?

Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 2008

 

No one ever knows that one is a part of a cultural trend. This is why the America Bashers can’t see themselves in their self-caricature: they are trapped within the blindness of their own unconscious and irrational mind.

 

The twin tragedies of the American Republic of the enslavement of Africans, on the one hand, and the forced relocation of the Indians, on the other, were not occurences outside of all historical event-streams. They were, rather, contextual, preexisting traps set for civilization by previous centuries, on all inhabited continents, and America infamously and heedlessly fell headlong into these traps. But America possess this difference from the critics who so excoriate America: famously, America has emerged vigorously from denial, and admitted its wrongdoing in an honest way.

 

In fact, America is unprecedented among nations in reforming itself morally, and in living up to the pledges made in the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution. Not content with this, America has even become the world’s moral leader, enforcing the dictates of goodness whenever and wherever it can. No other country, save England, who began in the second half of the eighteeenth century a noble, lonely, 100-year long quest to end the slave trade out of Africa, can claim half so much morally as America. The most spectacular moral achievements in human history are those that America has wrought in its society and civilization.

 

But there are many in this world of a differing view. It’s imperative to emphasize that these observers have a tendency to embrace the a priori ideologies which originated in the nineteenth century, namely race theory and class theory. (I say a priori ideologies because they are not based on actual empirical evidence.) That is, they want to hold up an ideal, self-interested picture of supposed moral perfection — which, even done sincerely, cannot exist in this particular world, but only in a wholly fictitious world without self-interest — and then wish to point out (disingenuously though) that America falls short of fulfilling this picture.

 

We knew that already, however, and the tactic is insincere and sinister: all of these ideologies of the past are clearly discredited for their pseudo-scientific hypocrisy, and for just plain evil craziness, too. But why do some souls persist in seeing America as the doer of evil rather than as its vanquisher? As the greatly missed, pro-America French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel put it, this strange phenomenon is due to the tendency of cultural Marxism to blame on America the very global, monstrous crimes that Marxism itself has committed. So we see here that America is alone in emerging from denial: Marxism won’t take up the example anytime soon. It’s not in the nature of Marxism or Nazism or Islamofascism to get out of denial. They can explain all of human history, you see.

 

Moreover, there is one splendid difference between the past wrongdoing of America, on one hand, and the united past and present wrongdoing of Marxism and Nazism, on the other: the difference in the concept of law, and in what the law entails. For America, rooted in the Anglophile tradition, law is stability. But for the ideologies of race society and the classless society, however, law means development. Both Marxist ideology, based on the idea of economic social class struggle as the key concept for interpreting history, and Nazi ideology, based on the idea of race struggle as the key concept thereof, see themselves as fully justified in eliminating from the entire world what they see as “harmful” to the health of history and nature.

 

For the Marxist, it’s the bourgeois capitalist, for the Nazi, it’s the Jew. This means eliminating any possibility of discerning they ever existed at all, not just killing them. It’s based on an idea superimposed awkwardly and brutally on reality, namely, that they are bugs and vermin threatening the health of all others, and that the law of development in nature and in history demands their extermination. It is preexisting “guilt,” so called, based on no crime, real or imagined, that “demands” this action which renders civilization speechless.

 

It’s blatantly obvious that America never did such a thing, not even in the misguided, cruel decision to imprison Americans of Japanese ancestry during WWII. On the contrary, America has fought against such ideologies, and still does. American legal tradition is based on the idea that law is a stabilizer, that law’s tendency should be to create an ever more level playing field. But with the introduction of law as an alleged development of nature or history’s inevitable movement, those horrors and crimes ensue which are heretofore unexampled, in their cosmic and infinite cruelty, in all of human history.

 

Without America fighting this horrific new concept of law, that misbegotten concept would have indeed triumphed in the twentieth century, and our world become a dark gulag. The pursuit of happiness would have been replaced by plain, insuperable terror. But if we are cavalier about realizing this, it’s ironic, since it’s the very safety we enjoy from America’s power that allows us to denigrate that power without consequence, and leads us to believe myopically that there are no dangers. 

 

In sum, America has made grave moral mistakes, it’s true, but nothing remotely on the order committed in other parts of the world, and America has rectified its mistakes, furthermore, leaving the rest of the world behind. The America Bashing is a mistake: America is the best chance this world has. I thank my lucky stars that I live in America, that I live free in the most just society on Earth, within the very lighthouse of justice for the entire globe.

 

T.D.