American exceptionalism

On September 3, 2014 The Associated Press reported:  “Secretaries of State past and present meet for rare reunion for a museum ground breaking event…a museum and education centre that will demonstrate the ways in which diplomacy matters now and has mattered throughout American history.  Secretary of State John Kerry warned Wednesday against creeping American isolationism, making the case that U.S. global leadership is essential in uncertain times as he hosted a rare public reunion of five of his predecessors.”

Joseph Conrad is responsible for some of the best writing on imperialism’s darker side in the English language. The jungles of Marlowe and Kurtz in his classic novel Heart of Darkness remain some of literature’s ugliest manifestations of European hubris and white racism ever written. Conrad’s characters are so well contrived they have become metaphors for the imperial economic and cultural system of domination that is championed by its kings and rulers as much as it is maligned by its victims and those opposed to its machinations.

Image credit: The Unz Review
 
 

In the wake of the U.S.-engineered coup in Ukraine, the Western Press warns us solemnly and relentlessly that Vladimir Putin is Beelzebub himself, the leader of a vicious and backward Russia. Such deceit is reckless in the extreme since it puts the U.S. at odds with a nuclear power, one that is far from the weak nation that a condescending and insulting Obama sought to depict in his recent interview with The Economist, debunked here. Of course such lies are not new.

By Patrick Foy | CounterPunch | June 30, 2014 On Wednesday, June 25th, the Financial Times published an essay by Francis Fukuyama. He is the famed US political scientist, a “neoconservative” apostate and author of The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. The title of his op-ed is “ISIS risks distracting US from more menacing […]

By Patrick Foy | CounterPunch | June 30, 2014 On Wednesday, June 25th, the Financial Times published an essay by Francis Fukuyama. He is the famed US political scientist, a “neoconservative” apostate and author of The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. The title of his op-ed is “ISIS risks distracting US from more menacing […]

 
 
By Finian Cunningham
A first step for world peace is for the American people to rein in their reckless government from the international stage and to stop it making misery for so many.
Americans need democratic government like the rest of the world needs rid of Washington’s thuggish global policeman.

“Today no American is safe from his own government”, writes Paul Craig Roberts in his introduction to his new book on How America was Lost: From 9/11 to the Police/Warfare State (Clarity Press, 2014). To anticipate the essence of the book: The greatest threat to the freedom of the American people comes from their own government and not from an imaginary terrorist threat. This alarmist rhetoric serves as a pretext for America’s wars of aggression.

Bias in favor of the orthodox is frequently mistaken for ‘objectivity’. Departures from this ideological orthodoxy are themselves dismissed as ideological.
– Michael Parenti

An exchange in January with Paul Farhi, Washington Post columnist, about coverage of US foreign policy:

I rarely accept invitations for speaking arrangements. It is not my cup of tea. When I rarely do I insist in dividing my allocated time into 1/3 for speaking and 2/3 for Q & A. I don’t like canned speeches, but I happen to truly like lengthy Q & A sessions. Why? Because: It enables me to talk about what my audience really wants to hear about, it gives me a chance to get to know others’ points of view and perceptions, and let’s face it, it just makes the whole process less boring, more interactive, less predictable, thus more fun.