Sake White

Someone was googling Eating Soup with a Fork and found my post that I wrote a while ago. Btw, there’s an amazon book titled something “Eating Soup with a Knife”. The point is, if you exert too much strength in an effort to complete the task, you might stab yourself in the throat. So the knife is both a tool and also a way to hurt yourself. Which translates into, don’t turn the locals against you, in an effort to stamp out resistance.

There was this original comment that I had forgotten about, that gave me this link

The Sorrows of Empire, Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic was an attempt to come to grips with our militarism. Now, I’m considering how we’ve managed to alienate so many rich, smart allies–every one of them, in fact. How we’ve come to be so truly hated. This, in a Talleyrand sense, is the sort of mistake from which you can’t recover. That’s why I’m planning on calling the third volume of what I now think of as “The Blowback Trilogy,” Nemesis. Nemesis was the Greek goddess of vengeance. She also went after people who became too arrogant, who were so taken with themselves that they lost all prudence. She was always portrayed as a fierce figure with a scale in one hand–think, Judgment Day–and a whip in the other. - Chalmers Johnson

I just realized something. There are too many links and quotes that I need to find, if I am to post all the things about anti-Americanism as I wish to post from faint remembrances. Oh well.

Somebody from usmc.mil was googling for novelization of Planescape Torment and found my little effort here at my old site. I hate digging up links like this. Takes forever. Even with multiple tab browsing…

Then there was someone from the Netherlands who came across a comment I left here concerning the Western-Muslim strategy of rape and intimidation. Not exactly anti-American per say, just anti-human.

Then there is this post at huffington was rather.. peculiar.

Whenever I visit this lovely blog, I usually run into someone - a “leftist,” if you will - who finds pleasure in things that make our country or the President look bad. I suppose I could say these angry types are no better than cheerleaders for terrorism. After all, both entities - the left and terrorists - seem to share the same desire: to put the US, humiliatingly, in its place.

But I would be wrong to say such things. Very wrong. Of course, “dissent is patriotic,” and the left is only critical of America because it simply loves our country much more than I do.

That’s why calling them terrorists would be intolerant and pretty shameful.

But what about “patriotic terrorists?”

That’s kinda neat.

What is a patriotic terrorist?

It is an American who claims to love his or her country while enjoying the enemy’s success against said country. It is a person who gets deeply offended if you question their patriotism, while also appearing to share the same ideals of the more spirited folk who like to blow up innocent people.

Oh btw, don’t miss this from the interview with Nemesis’ prey.

Johnson: There is indeed. You can understand why these guys do it. Richard Helms, the director of the CIA back in 1977, was convicted of a felony for lying to Congress. He said, no, we had nothing to do with the overthrow of [Chilean President] Salvador Allende when we had everything to do with it. He gets a suspended sentence, pays a small fine, walks into the CIA building at Langley, Virginia, and is met by a cheering crowd. Our hero! He’s proudly maintained the principles of the secret intelligence service, which is the private army of the president and we have no idea what he’s doing with it. Everything they do is secret. Every item in their budget is secret.

It’s not rocket science to say that we’re talking about a tragedy in the works here. Americans aren’t that rich. We had a trade deficit in 2005 of $725.8 billion. That’s a record. It went up almost 25 percent in just over a year. You can’t go on not making things, fighting these kinds of wars, and building weapons that are useless. Herb Stein, when he was chairman of the council of economic advisers in a Republican administration very famously said, “Things that can’t go on forever don’t.”

Whew. A lot to read eh? Hot stuff here. My response? Hrm, just that wouldn’t defeating militarism benefit from saving individual citizens instead of sending them into the meat grinder? How does sending in kids off the farm to the slaughter of war, going to check militarism? Heh, private army, get it. Mercenary time. The views of the Left have been static for awhile people. You just hadn’t noticed until now because they were trying to keep it under wraps.

Check out this wiki list of communist spies produced via Venona decoding of Soviet spy documents. You get the sense that I got, that there were too many mentions of “big oil” in the backgrounds of the agents?

The Futurist had a great post on anti-Americanism.

Notably this portion of a Daily Kos… um thingie.

Posting all of it for your convenience. No need for link trees.

“Why do you hate America?” This is a remarkably easy question to provoke. One might, for instance, expose elements of this nation’s brutal foreign policy. Ask a single probing question about, say, U.S. complicity in the overthrow of governments in Guatemala, Iran, or Chile and thin-skinned patriots (sic) will come out of the woodwork to defend their country’s honor by accusing you of being “anti-American.” Of course, this allegation might lead me to ponder how totalitarian a culture this must be to even entertain such a concept, but I’d rather employ the vaunted Arundhati defense. The incomparable Ms. Roy says: “What does the term ‘anti-American’ mean? Does it mean you are anti-jazz or that you’re opposed to freedom of speech? That you don’t delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant sequoias?” (I’m a tree hugger remember? I don’t argue with sequoias.)

When pressed, I sometimes reply: “I don’t hate America. In fact, think it’s one of the best countries anyone ever stole.” But, after the laughter dies down, I have a confession to make: If by “America” they mean the elected/appointed officials and the corporations that own them, well, I guess I do hate that America-with justification.

Among many reasons, I hate America for the near-extermination and subsequent oppression of its indigenous population. I hate it for its role in the African slave trade and for dropping atomic bombs on civilians. I hate its control of institutions like the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization. I hate it for propping up brutal dictators like Suharto, Pinochet, Duvalier, Hussein, Marcos, and the Shah of Iran. I hate America for its unconditional support for Israel. I hate its bogus two-party system, its one-size-fits-all culture, and its income gap. I could go on for pages but I’ll sum up with this: I hate America for being a hypocritical white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

After a paragraph like that, you know what comes next: If you hate America so much, why don’t you leave? Leave America? That would potentially put me on the other end of U.S. foreign policy. No thanks.

I like how Paul Robeson answered that question before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956: “My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I’m going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?”

Since none of my people died to build anything, I rely instead on William Blum, who declares, “I’m committed to fighting U.S. foreign policy, the greatest threat to peace and happiness in the world, and being in the United States is the best place for carrying out the battle. This is the belly of the beast, and I try to be an ulcer inside of it.”

Needless to say, none of the above does a damn thing to placate the yellow ribbon crowd. It seems what offends flag-wavers most is when someone like me makes use of the freedom they claim to adore. According to their twisted logic, I am ungrateful for my liberty if I have the audacity to exercise it. If I make the choice to not salute the flag during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium, somehow I’m not worthy of having the freedom to make the choice to not salute the flag during the seventh inning stretch at Yankee Stadium. These so-called patriots not only claim to celebrate freedom while refusing my right to exploit it, they also ignore the social movements that fought for and won such freedoms.

There’s plenty of tolerated public outcry against the Bush administration and the occupation of Iraq, but it’s neither fashionable nor acceptable to go as far as saying, no, I do not support the troops and yes, I hate what America does. Fear of recrimination allows the status quo to control the terms of debate. Until we voice what is in our hearts and have the nerve to admit what we hate…we will never create something that can be loved.

Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net.

Notice how they complain about their speech not being tolerated as a defense for why they should not use the very freedoms they are given in America to destroy those providing such a freedom? Or how about this, that it is an inherently dishonorable method of warfare to say that you don’t like American foreign policy’s effects on the world, but wish to live in America so as to be immune from American foreign policy. The author states that quite explicitly. And they see no guilt, no dishonor, in it. To live in a nation that you wish to control, manipulate, and destroy, while at the same time benefiting from the system of oppression, as they might call it. Patriotic terrorists, remember posto n Huffington?

And now for the coup de grace that ends this post. A genealogy of anti-AMericanism.

America’s rise to the status of the world’s premier power, while inspiring much admiration, has also provoked widespread feelings of suspicion and hostility. In a recent and widely discussed book on America, Après L’Empire, credited by many with having influenced the position of the French government on the war in Iraq, Emmanuel Todd writes: “A single threat to global instability weighs on the world today: America, which from a protector has become a predator.” A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media’s coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans. During the few days before America’s attack on Baghdad, European commentators displayed a barely concealed glee - almost what the Germans call schadenfreude - at the prospect of American forces being bogged down in a long and difficult engagement. Max Gallo, in the weekly magazine Le Point, drew the typical conclusion about American arrogance and ignorance: “The Americans, carried away by the hubris of their military power, seemed to have forgotten that not everything can be handled by the force of arms … that peoples have a history, a religion, a country.”

Time will tell, of course, if Gallo was even near correct in his doubts about U.S. policy. But the haste with which he arrived at such sweeping conclusions leads one to suspect that they were based far more on a pre-existing view of America than on an analysis of the situation at hand. Indeed, they were an expression of one of the most powerful modes of thought in the world today: anti-Americanism. According to the French analyst Jean François Revel, “If you remove anti-Americanism, nothing remains of French political thought today, either on the Left or on the Right.” Revel might just as well have said the same thing about German political thought or the thought of almost any Western European country, where anti-Americanism reigns as the lingua franca of the intellectual class.