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August 09, 2009

Comments

Branedy

I'm incensed over this myself, makes me ashamed to be a U.S. citizen, Fascism is what my father and my Uncles had to fight in WWII. I didn't expect the GOP to bring it back. I'm glad that I'm also an Irish Citizen as well now. Even thought the Irish sometimes believe themselves the 51st state :-)

RobiNZ

Interested you quote Robert McNamara. His change of mind, as seen in The Fog of War, taught me more on how & why the US struggles to understand the world beyond their borders.

Earl Mardle

Robin. No question about the failure of the US to understand the rest of the world.

I think most empires have, except perhaps the Romans who succeeded in the short term by co-opting and intermarrying and failed in the long term, in part, because the representatives of the empire found their allegiances in their new homes.

But that's a factor of the Imperial mind, perfectly exemplified by this arrogant bastard quoted by Ron Suskind in 2004.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Blankenhorn did a piece a while back on the empire (any empire) as a ponzi scheme. As long as the flow of wealtrh from the vassal states kept flowing in to the centre it worked. And if it worked long enough, those at the centre took that flow as their baseline for all decisions; it blinded them to the reality that, at some point, the flow would stop.

The Imperial mind is the outcome of that blindness.

Nevertheless, we outsiders need to understand THEM because when they succeed their arbitrary actions affect us all and we have to be ready for them, and when they fail, as they will, they create huge damage everywhere and being able to anticipate that gives us a small, very small, edge.

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