verging_on_random

God bless America (and screw everyone else)

January 24, 2007 on 2:13 pm | In Uncategorized |

I try not to be reflexively anti-American but I do think there are good objective reasons for the global wave of anti-Americanism illustrated in a recent survey. Despite the rhetoric, despite the carefully-nurtured public image as the leader of the free world and moral champion of democracy against the forces of evil, the evidence is that the Bush Administration is concerned exclusively with the interests of one group of people: citizens of the US of A. To protect those interests, the Bushistas are prepared to ruin the lives of countless millions who happen to live in the wrong countries.

The invasion and occupation of Iraq have so far been the cause of hundreds of thousands of deaths and an even greater number of people being maimed. There can hardly be a family in Iraq that has not suffered the pain of bereavement. Millions of Iraqis have been made homeless. None of this seems to matter to the Bushistas. They care so little about the human consequences of their blundering violence in the War on Terror that they don’t even bother trying to keep count of deaths and injuries and refugees. They’re simply not relevant data.

In case somebody is extreme enough to argue that Muslims all share some kind of collective guilt for September 11 so they deserve what’s coming to them, the Iraqi occupation has seen the local Christians treated as harshly as anyone. According to those notorious terrorist-sympathising lefties from the Church of England, 350,000 Iraqi Christians have fled Iraq since the invasion. But for the Bushistas these facts are just not on the radar - the Iraqi occupation is justified because it’s in American interests, period.

During the second world war, German occupiers on a few occasions killed local citizens in reprisal for the killing of a German soldier: 10 for 1, or when the monster Heydrich was assassinated, 100 to 1 from memory. These comparatively isolated incidents are rightly remembered as evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Nazi regime. Yet a similar rationale has marked the Bushistas’ response to September 11. In some ways it’s even more unnerving because at least reprisal killings in hot blood reflect an instinct for revenge that’s a common response to deliberate violence in the human race. In the case of the Bushistas, kill ratios of 100:1 or more are simply accepted with a shrug. They’re not deliberately inflicted nor are they especially regretted. They just are.

Ever since 2001 and the chest-beating childishness of ‘You’re either with us or against us’, the Bushistas have demonstrated a total disregard for the opinions or welfare of any other nation on earth. And now, of course, they are showing the same disregard for the opinions of their own Congress and the majority of the American people.

In these circumstances it’s not at all surprising that only 29% of people around the world think the USA is a positive influence in the world. Indeed it’s a wonder the figure isn’t lower; no doubt there is a lingering affection and respect for the nation that we all once thought we knew.

As one of the invaders and occupiers, what has Australia done to recognise the plight of refugees fleeing the sectarian violence that we helped unleash? Well we’ve spent $250 million on a new detention centre on Christmas Island … because we decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.

And the US intake this year for the Iraqi refugees who owe their misery overwhelmingly to Bush’s invasion?

500.

The price that the USA will pay for their blatant lack of interest in anybody’s welfare other than their own will be a heavy one, and it will continue to be paid for many years. Its claims to have some special moral standing in the world community have perhaps been extinguished forever.

This will be the legacy of the incompetent ideologue who today presented the latest version of The State of the Bush Alternative Reality.