To cactoblasta:
I agree that everyone thinks they have the right to an opinion, and to air it, and while that can lead to all sorts of nonsense being current in the public sphere I don't think that it's necessarily a bad thing in itself. Contemporary democracy is nothing without free exchange of opinion and open debate.
America could (and would, if need arose) fight any number of what might be called 'classical' wars, in which large-scale forces are deployed against each other, and have no fear of losing - being able to apply a greater degree of force to a wider range of targets for a more extended period than anyone else can. But she hasn't fought such a conflict since the end of WW2. Instead they have all been small wars fought against enemies who used alternative guerilla tactics. Wars not able to be won by the application of overwhelming force because the targets of that force are too mobile, too intimately familiar with the terrain, to be pinned down and crushed.
the shadow of Vietnam has haunted every conflict America has been involved in since that first great military, social, and political debacle. I think it was then that America's confidence in herself, in her own rectitude, her ability and worth, were first shaken. And every miserable conflict America has taken part in has been of the same type; unwinnable wars fought in remote lands for seemingly no gain at all - and an ongoing loss of America's good name in the world.
However, I also think that this crisis of confidence is not unique to America but is something that has permeated the West since the end of WW2 and the passing of the Old European Empires and the end of the colonial period. America has her own angst with its own sources. Europe has its ennui, its cynicism, its disdain for patriotism and its inability to conceive of itself as anything other than a loose alliance of trading partners with delusions of military glory. The sources are different, the expression is different but the end result, the malaise, is the same. In the case of Europe you can see its effects in the spinelessness of the response to militant Islam.
I found myself ashamed of my British origins when Jack Straw, then Foreign Minister under that pernicious insect Blair, assured Muslims in Britain that their 'feelings' would be respected - the same Muslims who had the previous day paraded down the streets of London carrying placards inciting the murder of all those who did not condemn the publication of the Muhammad cartoons.
I am not interested in the feelings of any section of society: white, black, yellow; christian or muslim or jew. I am interested in whether they obey the law or not, and I expect all persons and groups who break it to be punished (not 'rehabilitated' - punished). I'm also interested in government that is self-confident, that upholds the core values of the society it represents, whose will it ought to express. Multiculturalism, with all its craven accommodation of the alien and the stranger, is a phenomenon of cultures that have lost faith in themselves - even here, in America, a nation born out of a multiplicity of cultures. Nowadays there are such abominations as the 'African' American - instead of Americans whose skin is black and whose ancestry is African. The same could be said of any American who prefaces his nationality with another. Such tribalism might have had its uses in the early days of America, serving to illustrate that despite origins and ethnicity, a citizen of America was fundamentally American and not, say, Irish or Polish.
Tribalism of that kind could flourish precisely because there was another identification, with citizenhood and the Constitution, which gave to such tribalism an overarching framework that allowed it to exist with the idea of America as something to which loyalty ought to be given first.
In this time of effette multicultral faggotry and national self-doubt there can be no room for such tribalism anymore. Now primacy must be given to the American in a 'polish' or 'german' or 'african' American: because the two hundred or so years of America's existence have demonstrated that to secure unity among many who are different it's not origins that must be stressed but the framework of law which defines the polity - not merely the rights of citizens but the obligations of citizens must be emphasized and fulfilled.
How odd that it should have been JFK who laid the foundations of Johnson's 'Great Society' and its bloated welfarism - when it was he who had said "Ask not what your country can do for you - but what you can do for your country."
The young man I spoke to in Ohio had no faith in America. He had no faith in her elected government - neither in its honesty nor in its ability, and none whatsoever in her politicians (and looking at them who could blame him?) But he either did not know or had forgotten how much America has achieved - the establishment of a Republic on the basis of law, not wealth or caste; the defeat of first Fascism and then Communism, the two great ideological opponents of Democracy. The creation of a society in which opportunity does actually abound for those willing to take it up and to work hard. And too many other things beside for me to name here.
Too much has been forgotten, lost, and distorted in the rise of multiculturalism and with it sympathy for the stranger before faith in our own. I don't give a damn how many died at Wounded Knee - every death was necessary in the expansion of the American polity - and had you asked those responsible for those killings if they were justified I doubt they would have said anything but "Yes". that expansion helped produce this nation, was necessary to its existence, and is not a moral category to which judgments of 'right' and 'wrong' can be applied. It simply was, like any other force of nature that destroys what stands in its path.
Such a view isn't taught in American schools. Instead educationalists obsess over the most culturally sensitive way in which to convince kids that evil white men made America by killing noble red men, with the implication that the America they created is in itself evil because of the manner of its coming into being.
Fiddlesticks. The descendants of every slaughtered Indian ought to give thanks for that slaughter and be honoured by it - since their ancestors played a foundational role in the creation of America, and they now live to reap the benefits of that creation. And if they find they have no benefits then it's not the 'evil white men' who are at fault but they themselves, for having insufficient spine to adapt and become American, rather than languishing in drunken, self-pitying misery as 'native' Americans.
There is no such thing as a 'native' American (except in the sense of one born within the American Republic, as opposed to one whose ancestors were born on land which is now America). But the insistence on respecting such fatuous, artificial divisions is also a symptom of the malaise I spoke about, a society's lack of faith in itself and its achievements - something that can only be cured by the conscious effort of every American to hold on to the greatness of his or her country.
