Re: Those Arrogant Americans

It's too bad James Lewis didn't finish the quote from Obama's Strasbourg speech, following "...derisive":

"But in Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual, but can also be insidious.  Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what is bad.  On both sides of the Atlantic, these attitudes have become all too common.  They are not wise.  They do not represent the truth. They threaten to widen the divide across the Atlantic and leave us both more isolated.  They fail to acknowledge the fundamental truth that America cannot confront the challenges of this century alone, but that Europe cannot confront them without America."

In total, I call that a fair & balanced, and yes, hopeful, assessment.  It threw Europeans a rhetorical bone, but also gave them some criticism to chew on.  That's quintessential diplomacy.

I couldn't be more pleased.

As for selective quotation of our president, and virulent francophobia, I expect nothing less of Realclearpolitics.

P.S. -- The "we saved your ass back in WWII" argument isn't going to work forever, if it hasn't stopped working already.  Just like our gratitude to the French for saving our asses during the American Revolution long ago passed its expiration date.

P.P.S. -- To say that America liberated E. Europe is way too simplistic and self-serving, and completely disregards the risks,  sacrifices and achievements of the people living in those countries, for example the Solidarity movement in Poland, Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, the UPA separatist army in Ukraine, and thousands of brave dissidents like Vasyl Stus who stood up to an evil regime and paid the ultimate price, but whose example lived on.  In a word, Lewis's statement is wrong, and yes, comes off as completely ignorant and arrogant. We should be thanking them for freeing themselves and making the world a more open, peaceful, prosperous and democratic place for us all to live in.

"In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

 

-- President Barack Obama, April 3, 2009

 

Those Arrogant Americans

By James Lewis

April 6, 2009  | RealClearPolitics.com

 

We have a rock star president who for the first time in American history fired the President of a private corporation, General Motors, then immediately flew to Europe with an entourage of 500 courtiers and a worshipful media, bowed waist-deep to the King of Saudi Arabia, and proceeded to accuse his own country of arrogance.

 

In France, of all places.

 

Does anybody else think this guy is shockingly ignorant?  I wonder if he has every really talked to a concentration camp survivor, or a Cuban refugee, or a boat person from Vietnam?  Or a Soviet dissident.  Or a survivor or Mao's purges.

 

Not to mention families with fallen American soldiers in the graveyards.  Yes, he's going to Normandie, but will he apologize for our arrogance there, too?  Does he really understand anything beyond the PC history of the world?  Or will he just lie in his photo op at the American Cemetery at Normandie?

 

Ahhh, those arrogant Americans.  First they rebel against King George III and all the crowned heads of Europe.  Then they welcome tens of millions of poor and persecuted people from the Old World.  Then they fail to bow down to Europe's greatest figures -- from Napoleon and Otto von Bismarck to the Kaiser, Hitler and Stalin.  Then they fight a civil war, losing half a million people to liberate black people in America.  Then they diss the man the BBC considers to be the greatest philosopher ever, one Karl Marx, whose followers killed 100 million innocents in the 20th century.  And then, to topit all off, they liberate both the Western half of Europe (in 1946) and the Eastern half (in 1989).

 

What arrogance these Americans have.  Either that, or a very, very -- no, stunningly -- ignorant man was just elected president. What kind of man has such an obsessive need to put down his own country?  Especially given our real history?  Has he ever read an honest history book?

VA Tech and 'an American particularity'

Shootings

by Adam Gopnik
The New Yorker | April 30, 2007

The cell phones in the pockets of the dead students were still ringing when we were told that it was wrong to ask why. As the police cleared the bodies from the Virginia Tech engineering building, the cell phones rang, in the eccentric varieties of ring tones, as parents kept trying to see if their children were O.K. To imagine the feelings of the police as they carried the bodies and heard the ringing is heartrending; to imagine the feelings of the parents who were calling—dread, desperate hope for a sudden answer and the bliss of reassurance, dawning grief—is unbearable. But the parents, and the rest of us, were told that it was not the right moment to ask how the shooting had happened—specifically, why an obviously disturbed student, with a history of mental illness, was able to buy guns whose essential purpose is to kill people—and why it happens over and over again in America. At a press conference, Virginia's governor, Tim Kaine, said, "People who want to . . . make it their political hobby horse to ride, I've got nothing but loathing for them. . . . At this point, what it's about is comforting family members . . . and helping this community heal. And so to those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say take that elsewhere."

If the facts weren't so horrible, there might be something touching in the Governor's deeply American belief that "healing" can take place magically, without the intervening practice called "treating." The logic is unusual but striking: the aftermath of a terrorist attack is the wrong time to talk about security, the aftermath of a death from lung cancer is the wrong time to talk about smoking and the tobacco industry, and the aftermath of a car crash is the wrong time to talk about seat belts. People talked about the shooting, of course, but much of the conversation was devoted to musings on the treatment of mental illness in universities, the problem of "narcissism," violence in the media and in popular culture, copycat killings, the alienation of immigrant students, and the question of Evil.

Some people, however—especially people outside America—were eager to talk about it in another way, and even to embark on a little crusade. The whole world saw that the United States has more gun violence than other countries because we have more guns and are willing to sell them to madmen who want to kill people. Every nation has violent loners, and they tend to have remarkably similar profiles from one country and culture to the next. And every country has known the horror of having a lunatic get his hands on a gun and kill innocent people. But on a recent list of the fourteen worst mass shootings in Western democracies since the nineteen-sixties the United States claimed seven, and, just as important, no other country on the list has had a repeat performance as severe as the first.

In Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, a gunman killed sixteen children and a teacher at their school. Afterward, the British gun laws, already restrictive, were tightened—it's now against the law for any private citizen in the United Kingdom to own the kinds of guns that Cho Seung-Hui used at Virginia Tech—and nothing like Dunblane has occurred there since. In Quebec, after a school shooting took the lives of fourteen women in 1989, the survivors helped begin a gun-control movement that resulted in legislation bringing stronger, though far from sufficient, gun laws to Canada. (There have been a couple of subsequent shooting sprees, but on a smaller scale, and with far fewer dead.) In the Paris suburb of Nanterre, in 2002, a man killed eight people at a municipal meeting. Gun control became a key issue in the Presidential election that year, and there has been no repeat incident.

So there is no American particularity about loners, disenfranchised immigrants, narcissism, alienated youth, complex moral agency, or Evil. There is an American particularity about guns. The arc is apparent. Forty years ago, a man killed fourteen people on a college campus in Austin, Texas; this year, a man killed thirty-two in Blacksburg, Virginia. Not enough was done between those two massacres to make weapons of mass killing harder to obtain. In fact, while campus killings continued—Columbine being the most notorious, the shooting in the one-room Amish schoolhouse among the most recent—weapons have got more lethal, and, in states like Virginia, where the N.R.A. is powerful, no harder to buy.

Reducing the number of guns available to crazy people will neither relieve them of their insanity nor stop them from killing. Making it more difficult to buy guns that kill people is, however, a rational way to reduce the number of people killed by guns. Nations with tight gun laws have, on the whole, less gun violence; countries with somewhat restrictive gun laws have some gun violence; countries with essentially no gun laws have a lot of gun violence. (If you work hard, you can find a statistical exception hiding in a corner, but exceptions are just that. Some people who smoke their whole lives don't get lung cancer, while some people who never smoke do; still, the best way not to get lung cancer is not to smoke.)

It's true that in renewing the expired ban on assault weapons we can't guarantee that someone won't shoot people with a semi-automatic pistol, and that by controlling semi-automatic pistols we can't reduce the chances of someone killing people with a rifle. But the point of lawmaking is not to act as precisely as possible, in order to punish the latest crime; it is to act as comprehensively as possible, in order to prevent the next one. Semi-automatic Glocks and Walthers, Cho's weapons, are for killing people. They are not made for hunting, and it's not easy to protect yourself with them. (If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.)

Rural America is hunting country, and hunters need rifles and shotguns—with proper licensing, we'll live with the risk. There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register. Until it does, phones will ring for dead children, and parents will be told not to ask why.

BBC series: 'Death to US': Anti-Americanism examined

The US is perceived by many as an international bully, a modern day imperial power. At this critical moment in history, Washington correspondent Justin Webb challenges that idea.

He argues anti-Americanism is often a cover for hatreds with little justification in fact. His three part series takes him to Cairo, Caracas and Washington but it begins where anti-Americanism began - in Paris.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6547881.stm