The impulse for US hegemony in the world
By Gaither Stewart
Continued. Read Part I of the article here
I often return to the passage from Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes’ masterpiece, The Death of Artemio Cruz, the gist of which is that one cannot commit what North Americans have committed against Mexico and expect to be loved. The historical imperialistic, hypocritical, vicious, greedy and vulgar attitudes of the United States toward its southern neighbor are the model for America ’s drive for world hegemony and its urge to control other peoples. From the beginnings of the nineteenth century until the present era, the United States has attempted to export its “American dream” to Mexico. Hypocritically that manifest destiny vision tried to superimpose Protestant values, a capitalist free market and a consumer society onto a culture foreign to such Protestant values.
The results: Shouts of “Long Live Mexico” and “Death to the Yankees” today echo similar protests ringing out from Afghanistan to the Middle East .
It is fact that more and more peoples of the world consider America evil, distant and cut off from the rest of humanity. I believe American people too, no less than Europeans, could bear up under the reality that the message of Americanism is not true. You know, people do not need to be lied to. Most can take the truth. Or they might prefer the truth after they get used to it; our minds after all have the task of distinguishing between true and false.
Still, it continues to be bizarre that we live our little lives inside our shell and have no idea of what is taking place on the outside. Only a thin wall separates our shell of comfort and ease from the exterior world where torture continues. In my mind, the kind of Americanism spoken of here, a life style based on comfort and ease, reflect anti-reality, anti-man, anti-life.
If anything, we have to learn to live without illusions.
No matter how clever, how perceptive and well grounded its positions, official America - and many Americans—seem to see Iraq and Iran , Kosovo and Algeria , from a virtual point of view. Europeans see those peoples instead as real places in a real world. A fundamental difference in attitude toward war is that Europeans know what war is on home soil. They know that war is not peace. War means suffering and destruction and death. War does not bring democracy.
A glaring assumption of Americanism is that the US military is a force for good (as reactionaries like to put it). That the US is the guiding light for the world, and is in sole possession of moral authority.
Cold War Revisionism
Because I once felt lonely in my nascent revisionist ideas on Soviet Communism and Stalinism and doubted the validity of my own thinking, I have postponed the question of Soviet Communism, which is not as distant from the power of Americanism as it might seem. Though as a rule I dislike the constant revisionism (that ism suffix again!), it goes without saying that the last word about Lenin’s heirs has not yet been spoken.
So careful here, for we’re speaking of seventy plus years of the 20th century that changed our world. Nor can one dispute that the Bolshevik Revolution changed the face of America , too. The revolutionary myth and four great events remain fixed in the memory of some of us: the American, French, Mexican and Russian revolutions. However, in America the revolutionary legacy morphed into one of the worst aspects of Americanism.
Fear and terror of Revolution transformed Americanism into a “way of life”, crusaded for in uninterrupted anti-progress wars ever since, accompanied by the Nazification of America’s institutions.
Like the many questions today open to re-interpretation, Communism is not a closed issue. Likewise, Soviet Communism is not a closed issue. With the broadening of the European Union toward the East the question of Communism is recurrent today because the EU is formed by peoples with opposite perceptions of it. For many East Europeans Communism was a nightmare. Nor was the exit from totalitarian regimes in East Europe a happy one in that it led some of those countries to blind faith in a savage market economy and abandonment of the spirit of social solidarity.
However, for many people in the world Communism is not a dirty word. Former East Germans in Berlin have described to me the nostalgia for the sense of social solidarity in former East Germany . Though the totalitarian regimes in East Europe vanished and Communist parties are marginalized, for the 450,000,000 people of the now twenty-seven nations of the European Union the sensation of something missing is real. Even though controversial, the memory of Communism is alive. Though Communism in practice is no longer considered a credible alternative in free market democracy, and though it no longer aims at revolution and though it still suffers from the image of Soviet totalitarian past, its memory is alive. The question of Communism has not been settled.
