From here
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European 'cockroaches' versus U.S. 'imperialists'
Adam Nicolson
The Daily Telegraph
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Perhaps the world that has been familiar for the past 50 years really is falling apart. Listen to this, the opening salvos in a column published within the past couple of weeks in the American political journal National Review. The author is a freelance journalist, Denis Boyles, and he is discussing the recent history and present condition of Europe: "Let's say you take a chunk of real estate the size of a small continent, devastate it with two of the biggest wars in the history of human conflict, then add a couple of massive genocides, a near-total collapse of most social structures, a megadose of intolerant secularism, a decline in educational standards, a flat-line birthrate and a truly impressive brain drain. Now try to imagine what kind of ideas would survive to emerge from the wreckage.
"Right. You get nihilism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, the three knee-jerk, irrational sentiments -- they fail to rise to the level of actual 'ideas' that inform the modern intellectual life of Europe. In other words, you get cockroaches.''
That is a degree of loathing and contempt, of wilful misinterpretation of foreigners, which you would normally associate with propaganda about an enemy in wartime. Stupid, uneducated, infertile, morally incompetent, socially dead, more animal than human: Boyles's Europe is a continent of Calibans. At no time since the American War of Independence have Americans, or at least some of them, including the hardline Republican Americans of the sort now in government in Washington, viewed Europe and the Europeans with such visceral hatred. But then try looking, as Boyles does not, at the other side. In Sir Peter Stothard's recent book on the inside workings of the Blair government during the build-up to the Iraq war, there is one moment of extraordinary candour.
In September 2002, Stothard writes, Blair's "analysis of the relations between Washington, London and Baghdad'' could be summarized in "six essential points to which he and his aides would regularly return." Five of them are obvious and well known: Saddam was a threat; Britain and America were his enemies; the post-9/11 United States was hungry for war; America would go to war whatever anyone else did; and all Europeans would require the involvement of the UN.
That's straightforward enough. But the sixth point, "scribbled on the back on an envelope',' in Stothard's phrase -- whether by Blair himself is not clear -- is the eye-opener: "It would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so.'' You can read that blandly, as another statement of the obvious, but at least its subtext is pretty well what Dennis Boyles claims all Europeans are thinking: the cockroach view that the new American unilateral imperialism is bad for the world. Europeans feel no gratitude for the wars, and the still more dangerous peacemaking and peacekeeping operations, which the Americans are now planning to undertake on Europe's behalf. Their brave and extraordinarily expensive crushing of the terror threat is viewed -- even within Blair's Downing Street -- as a source of damaged, not increased, security for the world.
It is odd that this argument for the British involvement in the war has not, apparently, been noticed before. The very things about American neo-con imperialism that the crowds marching through London were shouting at the closed gates of Downing Street were being endorsed behind them. Both governors and governed in Britain suspected the American empire; it just so happened that their answers to the problem were the direct opposites: Blair to join the war and blunt the Americanness of it; the British people, like the rest of Europe, to stay out.
In retrospect, it looks as if the people might have been right, but that, in a way, is not the point. The long-term and underlying reality is that Europe as a whole, including the Blair government, dislikes and distrusts the post-9/11 American attitude to the world. It is regarded as something not to welcome but control. The Americans, for their part, see only constitutionally bereft and knackered European cockroaches, unable to take on the moral (and financial) burdens that the defence of freedom requires.
There is widespread disgust in America, for example, at the Europeans' paltry contribution to the funds that will be devoted to the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. Saudi Arabia will provide US$1-billion in loans and credits to Iraq. Between them, France and Germany will contribute precisely nothing. Saudi Arabia, in other words, cares a great deal more about the Iraqis' freedom from tyranny than those European cockroaches who wanted sanctions lifted only so that they could sell their goods and services to a Saddam-dominated tyranny that was at least quiet and, more important, non-American. The suspicion in America -- and it is legitimate enough -- that Europe will do nothing to help the establishment of an American protectorate in the Middle East is alive and well.
Last weekend, The New York Times carried some fascinating remarks by Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister. Bildt says it comes down to a question of dates. Until recently, America and Europe shared 1945 as their definitive year, when one tyrannical enemy was defeated and another emerged, a succession of common threats which bound them into one alliance and one world view. But that date has now been eclipsed: in Europe by 1989, the crumbling of the great frontier that for more than four decades separated one half of Europe from the other; and in America by 2001, the cataclysmic moment when America came under murderous threat for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Those different dates are now driving Europe and America apart. "While we talk of peace, they talk of security,'' Mr. Bildt says on behalf of Europe. 'While we talk of sharing sovereignty, they talk about exercising sovereign power. When we talk about a region, they talk about the world.'' The real question is whether it is a rift that can be healed.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
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European 'cockroaches' versus U.S. 'imperialists'
Adam Nicolson
The Daily Telegraph
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Perhaps the world that has been familiar for the past 50 years really is falling apart. Listen to this, the opening salvos in a column published within the past couple of weeks in the American political journal National Review. The author is a freelance journalist, Denis Boyles, and he is discussing the recent history and present condition of Europe: "Let's say you take a chunk of real estate the size of a small continent, devastate it with two of the biggest wars in the history of human conflict, then add a couple of massive genocides, a near-total collapse of most social structures, a megadose of intolerant secularism, a decline in educational standards, a flat-line birthrate and a truly impressive brain drain. Now try to imagine what kind of ideas would survive to emerge from the wreckage.
"Right. You get nihilism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, the three knee-jerk, irrational sentiments -- they fail to rise to the level of actual 'ideas' that inform the modern intellectual life of Europe. In other words, you get cockroaches.''
That is a degree of loathing and contempt, of wilful misinterpretation of foreigners, which you would normally associate with propaganda about an enemy in wartime. Stupid, uneducated, infertile, morally incompetent, socially dead, more animal than human: Boyles's Europe is a continent of Calibans. At no time since the American War of Independence have Americans, or at least some of them, including the hardline Republican Americans of the sort now in government in Washington, viewed Europe and the Europeans with such visceral hatred. But then try looking, as Boyles does not, at the other side. In Sir Peter Stothard's recent book on the inside workings of the Blair government during the build-up to the Iraq war, there is one moment of extraordinary candour.
In September 2002, Stothard writes, Blair's "analysis of the relations between Washington, London and Baghdad'' could be summarized in "six essential points to which he and his aides would regularly return." Five of them are obvious and well known: Saddam was a threat; Britain and America were his enemies; the post-9/11 United States was hungry for war; America would go to war whatever anyone else did; and all Europeans would require the involvement of the UN.
That's straightforward enough. But the sixth point, "scribbled on the back on an envelope',' in Stothard's phrase -- whether by Blair himself is not clear -- is the eye-opener: "It would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so.'' You can read that blandly, as another statement of the obvious, but at least its subtext is pretty well what Dennis Boyles claims all Europeans are thinking: the cockroach view that the new American unilateral imperialism is bad for the world. Europeans feel no gratitude for the wars, and the still more dangerous peacemaking and peacekeeping operations, which the Americans are now planning to undertake on Europe's behalf. Their brave and extraordinarily expensive crushing of the terror threat is viewed -- even within Blair's Downing Street -- as a source of damaged, not increased, security for the world.
It is odd that this argument for the British involvement in the war has not, apparently, been noticed before. The very things about American neo-con imperialism that the crowds marching through London were shouting at the closed gates of Downing Street were being endorsed behind them. Both governors and governed in Britain suspected the American empire; it just so happened that their answers to the problem were the direct opposites: Blair to join the war and blunt the Americanness of it; the British people, like the rest of Europe, to stay out.
In retrospect, it looks as if the people might have been right, but that, in a way, is not the point. The long-term and underlying reality is that Europe as a whole, including the Blair government, dislikes and distrusts the post-9/11 American attitude to the world. It is regarded as something not to welcome but control. The Americans, for their part, see only constitutionally bereft and knackered European cockroaches, unable to take on the moral (and financial) burdens that the defence of freedom requires.
There is widespread disgust in America, for example, at the Europeans' paltry contribution to the funds that will be devoted to the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. Saudi Arabia will provide US$1-billion in loans and credits to Iraq. Between them, France and Germany will contribute precisely nothing. Saudi Arabia, in other words, cares a great deal more about the Iraqis' freedom from tyranny than those European cockroaches who wanted sanctions lifted only so that they could sell their goods and services to a Saddam-dominated tyranny that was at least quiet and, more important, non-American. The suspicion in America -- and it is legitimate enough -- that Europe will do nothing to help the establishment of an American protectorate in the Middle East is alive and well.
Last weekend, The New York Times carried some fascinating remarks by Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister. Bildt says it comes down to a question of dates. Until recently, America and Europe shared 1945 as their definitive year, when one tyrannical enemy was defeated and another emerged, a succession of common threats which bound them into one alliance and one world view. But that date has now been eclipsed: in Europe by 1989, the crumbling of the great frontier that for more than four decades separated one half of Europe from the other; and in America by 2001, the cataclysmic moment when America came under murderous threat for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Those different dates are now driving Europe and America apart. "While we talk of peace, they talk of security,'' Mr. Bildt says on behalf of Europe. 'While we talk of sharing sovereignty, they talk about exercising sovereign power. When we talk about a region, they talk about the world.'' The real question is whether it is a rift that can be healed.
© Copyright 2003 National Post
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) home. The last thing we need to do is put bases in a country that we arent occupying, full of people that dont like us, and building in military stregnth. There is a word for our bases. Its called "surrounded."