Americans tend to have a linear view of their history, a view in which we go from A to B with the occasional detour or stall but on an essentially logical and consistent course of expansion and improvement. For example, our definition of citizen has slowly but surely expanded. But there are areas in which we are worse off as a "free people" than we were 100 years ago.
Ironically enough, most Americans were in a sense more "free" during a period in which blacks and women could not vote. How could that be? We first have to define what we mean here by "freedom". Freedom in this case means freedom from a tyrannical government, rather than the freedom to vote. For the right to vote is useless, purely cosmetic, if one lives in a tyranny.
There was very little official tyranny in this country 100 years ago. Neglect, corruption, racism, soulless industrialism. All those things existed, of course. But as we have worked on curing all those ills, we have gone from a nation without official tyranny and without imperialism to the exact opposite.
We have learned to treat one another better. We have vastly improved our standard of living. We have crushed other tyrannies. But during that period, we lost our republic. And Woodrow Wilson was the man most responsible for killing it.
Woodrow Wilson was a tyrant, the closest we have ever come to having a dictator, and of course he is regularly described as one of our "greatest" presidents. There are two sides to Wilson's tyranny, domestic and foreign affairs. He used one against the other in expanding his dictatorial rule.
Domestically, Wilson was a "Progressive". This is a complicated ideology. At its best, it forces efficiency, transparency, and a sense of moral mission onto the jealous power of the state. At its worst, it gives control of government to unelected people while simultaneously expanding the authority of the government in all matters.
The focus here is more on Wilson's foreign policy and how it affected the way he governed. Wilson was re-elected in 1916 on the pledge to keep the United States out of the Great War then being waged in Europe. That was his platform. Peace.
Just as FDR in 1940 and LBJ in 1964, Americans in 1916 voted for the candidate that promised peace. In all cases we ended up with war, but we must remember and rejoice in the fact that the American people never knowingly voted for a war party until 2002. At any rate the point here is that in 1916 Americans explicitly voted for peace.
Wilson promptly gave them war. Now, for the sake of this argument, let us just assume that joining World War I was the right thing for us to do. To assume that truly makes an ass of u and me, but we'll just concede it for the sake of argument: The Great War was a Great Idea. The real point is what happened at home.
Wilson used the war to make himself dictator. He criminalized dissent. Any "utterance or publication" that "criticized the government" was illegal. Literally. Wilson was in charge of identifying these critics, of course, and Wilson became the state. Therefore any criticism of Wilson or anything he did or said was illegal.
Thousands were arrested. These were political prisoners, pure and simple. No prominent historians use this term, of course, employing the same rhetorical sophistry that forbids people from using the word "terrorist" to describe a white man who flies a plane into a building.
Scores of newspapers were shut down, their editors imprisoned and bankrupted. And as always, the true damage done is not indicated only by the number of arrests; what can not be adequately measured is the self-silencing that Americans imposed on themselves due to a fear of their own government.
Since it was illegal to oppose Wilson, politicians were fair game as well. The Socialist Party was huge in the United States during this period. One of the rationales of the tyranny of Wilson was that the "undesirable classes" were beginning to demand a bit too much from the government and were in need of a "firm hand" from Wilson and the new federal oligarchy, bristling with such new institutions as the FBI and IRS.
The Socialist Party was led by Eugene Debs. Wilson had Debs imprisoned for criticizing the war. He remained in prison until Wilson left office, having refused to pardon Debs for the unpardonable sin of criticizing Woodrow Wilson. Debs ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell. He got over 2 million votes.
Among Wilson's other contributions to our civilization? He came up with the brilliant idea of deputizing citizens to keep tabs on radical neighbors, aka paying citizens to betray fellow citizens with suspect political views. He started mass deportations of "anarchistic" elements. You know, like "Italians". Guilt by association became law under Wilson.
One last absurd example of Wilson's America: since we were allied with England in the Great War Wilson had just joined, and since it was illegal to criticize our policy, it was therefore illegal to criticize the British as well. After all, if our allies looked bad, we might look bad too.
Around this time one of the first feature-length motion pictures was released. The Spirit of '76 was the story of the American Revolution. The story of our triumph over the despised and tyrannical British. But since the British were now our friends, this simply would not do. The director was imprisoned. And so in Wilson's America, it became illegal to remember American history.
I'm not really sure why this man is remembered as anything other than the villain he was. Actually, I have a pretty good guess. Why is he remembered as "great"? Because he won a war. Right? Isn't that sort of the standard we have to assigning greatness to our leaders? Washington, Lincoln, and FDR are listed as our three greatest by nearly every single historian.
Why? Mostly because they were in charge during our three biggest wars. But Wilson was different. His war was different. World War I was not something the United States had to be involved in, unlike our 3 great wars. It was not something the American people largely wanted. It got 120,000 Americans killed. It accomplished nothing other than to guarantee World War II.
But here's the thing: we remember Wilson as great because his plan worked. We think he was great despite his tyranny because we have come to worship the state as he intended. We are jingoistic now, aggressive abroad but cowed and servile at home. We have given up the republic. The evidence is that we exalt the man who destroyed it.
It's as if St. Paul was still alive when the Roman Empire converted to Christianity...
The European relationship with violence can most aptly be described as total and amoral. Total violence or total pacifism. Europeans have gone from using total violence for utterly amoral ends to claiming total pacifism, which is amorality defined.
To use Germany as an example: In 1942, Germany employed violence in the amoral cause of wiping whole tribes of human beings from the face of the earth. In 1992, Germany refused to use violence to stop the same crime from being committed in Bosnia.
The German "rationale" in 1992 was that violence is "always wrong". This is not a noble stand of principle, a heartening example of a bloody lesson well learned. This is using guilt for the most amoral actions in recorded history as an exemption from making any moral judgements ever again.
"We Germans committed the Holocaust, so who are we to judge or intervene in a preventable Holocaust 50 years later?"
Europe knows both ends of the See-Saw, but they know nothing about balance. The opposing ends on the see-saw in question are the idolatry of the state and the idolatry of the individual. Europe went from exalting the state above all to exalting the individual above all; there was no in between.
America is comparatively superior at that in between, and therein lies the root of much of Europe's America envy.
Well into my father's lifetime, the European powers were perfectly willing to employ unprecedented levels of violence against any number of other people and against themselves. They went from using profligate violence at the drop of a hat to suppress people to refusing to use any violence to halt the type of suppression they used to dish out for breakfast.
In 1942 Germany used its wealth and manpower to either exterminate or displace whole "races" of people, even though "races" of people exist not in biology but in European ideology. In 1992 Germany refused to use its wealth and manpower to stop its neighbors from exterminating or displacing whole "races" of people.
This is the Europe that liberals praise. It is nothing to praise. It is desiccated, unwilling to use violence to halt blatant mass murder. America used to be different. And we still are, to some extent.
Europe has given up the ghost of the illusion that it could control billions of brown folks. The US hasn't quite gotten there yet. And that's too bad. We will learn Europe's lesson in time. But we won't take it too far.
What's too far? Well, I'll put it this way: if Europe were subjected to any sort of coordinated subversion or sabotage or invasion, what do you think would happen? Do you think Europe would defend itself? I don't. I think we'd have to save them. Again
That's the tragedy. Americans are overbearing and paranoid. But the Europeans are apathetic and amoral. They can afford to detach themselves and pontificate about the sins of American hegemony precisely because they have no self-reliance.
Europe bitching about US is akin to a teenager bitching about their parents; surely there are several valid complaints, but who's paying the bills?
Europe has become whole, free, and at peace for the first time in history thanks to US. Indeed, the very concept of "Europe" did not exist in most minds until very recently. Europe has historically been divided, enslaved and at war. We changed that equation for half of Europe in 1945, and eventually for all of it.
We have our sins, of course, but our sins since our imperium was born in 1947 have never reached the extremes of European ideology; we have not committed industrial genocide as policy nor would we tolerate it anywhere near us. Damning with faint praise perhaps, but faint is better than aint.
The winter Olympics are on as I write. The slalom event bears relevance to this subject matter. The skier has to weave back and forth laterally across the course to hit his or her goals. He or she also has to go downhill as fast as possible. So he or she must constantly weigh the benefits of forward versus lateral motion.
And that is what the US is relatively good at. We know how to zig-zag; we have lateral movement. The Europeans, on the other hand, are more interested in speed. They always get where they're going quicker than we do, but that conveniently ends up in US having to rescue them from a high ground that they never fought for and that isn't worth defending.
"Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows" ---Leonard Cohen
"Even a bird is chained to the sky" -----Bob Dylan
What is freedom? Like "truth" or "justice" everyone has their own definition. But at the root of freedom is this: to protect it you must violate it. Just as peace rests on a willingness to kill if necessary, freedom only exists if one if willing to deprive another of the same in certain situations.
This contradiction is precisely why we'll never agree on what freedom is. Is it given by God or men? Is its purpose to allow all behavior, or to keep people free from certain types of behaviors? But most important of all the queries is this: when is it acceptable to take someone else's "freedom" in order to secure your own?
Americans have a cultish fetish for "freedom", much of which is entirely rational; the founding of America did more for the palpable reality of "freedom" for more people than any other event up to that point in human history.
We all know how imperfect the freedom was, especially at the beginning, but America has added priceless timber to the reality of freedom, not least because it has not hesitated to kill for it (1776, 1860, 1941).
But what kind of freedom? Much of America's concept of freedom is tied up in property rights. In America, the individual's "freedom" to own things is held superior to the welfare of the society as a whole.
During the Cold War, we all know that very little of the "free world" was actually free. (South Korea, South Vietnam, Iran, Chile, etc.) None of these nations accorded their citizens any of the freedoms we hold dear, save one: the freedom to amass as much wealth as possible. Is it not telling that this one "freedom" was deemed sufficient for entrance into our club?
To many cultures, if not most, this is a rather perverted definition of "freedom" ; it is simply the "freedom" to be selfish and exploitative. It's much more complicated than that, of course, but we would do well to consider that critique.
What of freedom of speech and expression in general? Again, this is a good thing, but to many cultures, especially Islamic ones, "freedom of expression" seems more like "freedom to peddle pornography and to ridicule God's prophet in newspaper cartoons". Ridiculous? Maybe. But not entirely.
Would an Egyptian father want his daughter to have the "freedom" to watch and emulate American television and movies, where nearly 100% of the sex depicted takes place among young and unmarried people?
Would a peasant in Cuba want an American corporation to have the "freedom" to "own" the very land he lived on and the very sugarcane that he cut and harvested with his own hands?
Another of America's definitions of "freedom" is tied up in the Puritan ethos of pleasure-as-sin. If if gives you pleasure, it is a sin. Now, while this is occasionally true, it's a rather dim vision of life. Marijuana laws are perhaps the ultimate example. There is no other rationale for denying people the freedom to do as they please in this regard other than that some people are scandalized by other people enjoying their lives on their own terms.
So American notions of freedom are not as streamlined as most of us might think. Consider, what is a greater infringement on the "freedom" of all Americans: someone smoking a joint during the Daily Show, or corporations being "free" to donate an unlimited amount of money to national elections?
There was a report on NBC nightly news last night, one of dozens of similar reports in the last decade or so, which treated the rise of China as a surprising and vaguely threatening turn of events. The report ended with the reassurance of "experts" that China would have to change its form of government before it could be a truly "great" nation.
It takes a special sort of narcissism and historical ignorance to be shocked that the oldest continuous civilization in the world, and a civilization which accounts for more than one fourth of all mankind today, could ever dare to drive for "greatness".
By the time the United States was founded, the place and culture known as "China" had already existed for THOUSANDS of years. This is not a nation that is rising from nowhere; it is a nation experiencing one of its cyclical rises just as surely as it has since Moses was in short pants.
Americans tend to think of their rise to dominance as without precedent and as having been preordained by one god or another, whether secular or religious, Jesus or Jefferson. There is some truth to this myth, as there are to all myths. But the Chinese may understand the arc of our history better than we do, because they have nearly 20 times as much history of their own to compare it to.
America and China are very different cultures, close to being as different as any two large cultures on Earth are from one another. But the rise and fall of empires is curiously not very contingent on culture; many different cultures have produced empires, and every single one has fallen. That implies that culture sort of cancels itself out when it comes to the relative efficacy of empire.
Chinese empires, because of China's vastness and geographical remoteness, are unique. Chinese empires and forms of government fall just like all others, but they are never fully conquered. Chinese governments fall to other Chinese. China as a whole has never been conquered from outside.
This is why we can say that China is the oldest civilization on Earth, even though people have been living in settled societies for just as long or longer in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India. All of those places have been totally conquered and colonized time and time again by foreign invasions. Not so with China.
Every time something in China is overthrow, it's another Chinese that it is doing it, so the broader culture has remained remarkably intact, even if its politics are just as violent as anyone else's. China's unbroken history gives it alot to learn from, suffice it to say.
The United States, compared to China, is brand new. When Chinese Premier Chou Enlai was asked when he thought the lessons of the French Revolution were two centuries later, he replied, "to soon to tell". Of all the cultural differences between East and West, perhaps the differing concepts of time is the most telling.
How long has America been a world power? There are many ways to measure this. By 1880, we were a huge country with a huge economy, but we largely did our own thing. By 1900, we were able to subjugate small, poor nations thousands of miles away (the Phillipines, Hawaii). By 1917, we were able to tip the balance in the Great War. By 1945 we had the power to destroy whole countries. By 1992 there was nobody left to get in our way if we chose to do just that.
That's quite a run from the American perspective, but from the Chinese perspective it barely registers. We've had an entirely unchallenged military since the fall of the USSR. In those nearly 20 years, we've actually increased our military spending despite the lack of competitors and spent trillions of dollars on two wars, neither of which will be over any time soon. We are much more impressed by that than the Chinese are.
The most important mental task for this country is to accept that we do not, never have, could not, should not, and never will control this planet. We have been, are, and will continue to be one of the greatest nations, but there will be others in the club.
This is not something that needs to threaten us, this obvious reality. What is a threat, however, is the attitude that prevails now. An insistence that nobody come close to challenging us in any realm is tied up with so many of our phobias and our dysfunctions.
Societies do not become great simply be believing that they are great; they must also actively create greatness in each generation. Here's a simple comparison: what percentage of American children could read the Chinese symbols pictured above? 1? Now, what percentage of Chinese children can read English? Catch my drift?
If there is one human institution which is responsible for more misery than any other, it just may be the relatively new European concept of the nation-state.
Since we were all born in the 20th century, we of course have no direct knowledge of the world as it existed prior to that century. The century appears "normal" to us because we have no countervailing frame of reference, but it we step back we quickly see that the 20th century was the most unique in human history.
Put simply, more happened in the 20th century than in all of human history to that point. Among the things that happened was that the 20th century was by far the most violent in human history. People killed each other in numbers and for reasons that were simply inconceivable to even their grandparents.
And what was the cause of all this violence? Well, first of all the great majority of this violence took place in Europe. Much of the other violence was perpetrated or facilitated by Europeans throughout the rest of the world.
And most of this violence was the direct result of the new concept of nation-states as the European Empires collapsed at the beginning of the century. The assassination that sparked World War I was perpetrated by a Serbian who wanted Serbs to have their own independent nation-state rather than be a province in a huge multinational empire.
World War I destroyed the empires, in which people had lived in relative peace in communities that were very diverse. As the Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian empires collapsed, all the disparate groups in them scrambled to carve their own nation-states out of the corpse. The same pattern repeated the fall of the British and French empires after World War II.
As soon as the empires were gone, people became obsessed with purity in their new nation-states, rejecting the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan ideals of the empires. One of these people was Adolf Hitler, who was just the most famous ethnic cleanser of the century, who most aptly embodied this obsession with purity in the new nation states and distrust of "mixing" whereby nation states would lose their purity.
While different "peoples" had always existed, they had never before demanded contiguous stretches of land upon which they and only they could live. This idea, the idea of the nation-state as a home for a people where they could segregate and purify themselves, did not gain full steam in Europe until the late 19th century After Europe adopted this model, they imposed it on the parts of the world it colonized, which just so happens to have been the entire eastern hemisphere of the earth.
By the late 20th century the world consisted not of a handful of empires but of 200 nation-states, splintering into ever smaller and more "pure"entities. Making this denouement even bloodier is the fact that most of the borders of the world's new nations were drawn by Europe.
One of the most violent ironies is that the Middle East was a far more peaceful place before the British and French invented such nation-states as "Lebanon", "Iraq", and "Israel", among others.
When the British governed India as part of their empire, there was relatively little civil violence in India. When the British left the region known as "India", the landmass was divided into 2 nation-states, India and Pakistan. One was to be Hindu, one was to be Muslim.
The problem was that the people who lived there had never defined themselves in this way and, accordingly, lived with and among each other, so the only way to create 2 "pure" nations out of this empire was to do a whole bunch of killing and a whole bunch of ethnic cleansing.
The situation was the same in the Middle East, where Jews and Muslims lived relatively peacefully until it was decided that there should be new nation-states, one which was to be "Jewish", the others of which were to be Arab. Like in India, this new insistence on purity led to mass killing, mass expulsions, and decades of simmering hatred which could still erupt at any moment.
When Yugoslavia broke down in the 1990's, all of that violence was about how many, and what sort, of nation-states to carve out of that corpse. What was once one multi-ethnic mini-empire is now 8 small, weak, violent, but more ethnically "pure" nation-states.
The problem with the concept of the European style nation-state is that it calls for the impossible. Since minorities of some sort will always be prevalent in even the most "homogeneous" group, the quest for a true "nation" leads to endless killing and displacement in the name of the biologically and culturally impossible goal of "purification".
What if Hitler had succeeded in "purifying" Germany of every last Jew and Gypsy? Would he have stopped there? Or would he have continued identifying groups that were still not quite "German" enough?
What if the Pakistanis managed to kick every last Hindu into India? Would Pakistan then be satisfied with its Muslim "purity"? Or would it commence to purify its Muslims of newly-discovered "minorities"?
Imagine if the United States tried to define its nationhood in the European style. How many miniature nations would we have to split into to achieve "purity"? New York City alone would break into about 130 nations of its own, to start.
Europe has given many great gifts to our civilization. But it also, quite recently, spread the most insidious ideology across the world. This ideology held that people are divided into genetically and culturally distinct groups and that these groups can only "preserve" their purity and identity by seizing areas of land and cleansing that area of all "others".
Throughout all of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia are "nations" created on this racist and suicidal model. The United States, despite all its flaws, largely avoided this pitfall.
We're so used to thinking of nations as natural and real things that we're sometimes surprised that national borders aren't visible from outer space. Because they don't exist except for in the hearts of men. The good news is that unlike continental drift, these lines can be erased.
Americans tend to have a linear view of their history, a view in which we go from A to B with the occasional detour or stall but on an essentially logical and consistent course of expansion and improvement. For example, our definition of citizen has slowly but surely expanded. But there are areas in which we are worse off as a "free people" than we were 100 years ago.
