Is American exceptionalism a threat to the world?
Posted: Sat Jul 14, 2012 12:20 pm
Not a thread specifically about 'American exceptionalism' but rather I use this in the title to distinguish this from the many threads asking what people think of America.
I am sure we are all aware that the US has stereotypically viewed itself as the perfect form of government at the end of history (à la Fukuyama) and Gods Kingdom on Earth. There is not much debating the existence of this belief that has manifested itself from the very first puritan settlers or otherwise trying to put it in comparison to how other nations have viewed their place in the world (yeah, hyper-religious Ugandans are basically Britain's fault but try and find anything in Disraeli that matches Neo-conservative foreign policy).
The question is just how dangerous this makes the United States; one of the few nations of the world in which its leaders can talk of God telling them to go to war, one that will actively ignore the truth when it challenges its view of reality, and one that imposes its model onto the world. Similar regimes may have existed in Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia but the US variant of a capitalist end of history has been projecting itself for over 200 years now and remains embedded in the American conciousness. Make no mistake the biggest flaw in any post-apocalyptic story is the lack of little American flags everywhere even after the bombs fall.
Its not enough to merely put this away as simple flag waving or the evil shenanigans of an elite, we have a nation using demonology in its language in a war against "terror" which is not bound by secular law (or the opinions of its divine founding fathers), with a lobby that is actively working towards the final confrontation with evil on the plains of Armageddon. The American population is batshit and could at any moment turn on its allies -as I suppose it has already done so with the abduction and torture of foreign citizens. Not bound by law or reason.
So far no nation since the fall of communism has posed a threat to the United States and its only conceivable opponents are either a humbled Russia that thankfully has its own disorder of Orthodox opposition or a China that refuses to confront the US. This does not of course mean that organizations such as the European Union cannot be painted as agents of the devil despite its place as a bastion of neo-liberal thought and it does not mean that our current world order is stable but rather that currently America can afford to ignore reality.
The question of the thread then is what happens when the America can no longer afford to ignore reality and how it comes to terms with that when in the next century it may find itself in 1965 all over again -only this time as a declining power. We know what happens to madmen in the face of adversity, will the same be true when it comes to a question of nuclear war and how can the rest of the world seek to stop that from occurring?
I am sure we are all aware that the US has stereotypically viewed itself as the perfect form of government at the end of history (à la Fukuyama) and Gods Kingdom on Earth. There is not much debating the existence of this belief that has manifested itself from the very first puritan settlers or otherwise trying to put it in comparison to how other nations have viewed their place in the world (yeah, hyper-religious Ugandans are basically Britain's fault but try and find anything in Disraeli that matches Neo-conservative foreign policy).
The question is just how dangerous this makes the United States; one of the few nations of the world in which its leaders can talk of God telling them to go to war, one that will actively ignore the truth when it challenges its view of reality, and one that imposes its model onto the world. Similar regimes may have existed in Revolutionary France or Soviet Russia but the US variant of a capitalist end of history has been projecting itself for over 200 years now and remains embedded in the American conciousness. Make no mistake the biggest flaw in any post-apocalyptic story is the lack of little American flags everywhere even after the bombs fall.
Its not enough to merely put this away as simple flag waving or the evil shenanigans of an elite, we have a nation using demonology in its language in a war against "terror" which is not bound by secular law (or the opinions of its divine founding fathers), with a lobby that is actively working towards the final confrontation with evil on the plains of Armageddon. The American population is batshit and could at any moment turn on its allies -as I suppose it has already done so with the abduction and torture of foreign citizens. Not bound by law or reason.
So far no nation since the fall of communism has posed a threat to the United States and its only conceivable opponents are either a humbled Russia that thankfully has its own disorder of Orthodox opposition or a China that refuses to confront the US. This does not of course mean that organizations such as the European Union cannot be painted as agents of the devil despite its place as a bastion of neo-liberal thought and it does not mean that our current world order is stable but rather that currently America can afford to ignore reality.
The question of the thread then is what happens when the America can no longer afford to ignore reality and how it comes to terms with that when in the next century it may find itself in 1965 all over again -only this time as a declining power. We know what happens to madmen in the face of adversity, will the same be true when it comes to a question of nuclear war and how can the rest of the world seek to stop that from occurring?