Considerable number of Americans are being cheated by the media.
Critical Americans are aplenty but without power.
Read this and form your own views please.
"Dear Dinesh D’Souza,
I write to you not just as an Indian to an American, but also as one who shares many of the memories that run in your veins, the colour of the skin over that, and the respect for a good life and democratic freedoms that nestle somewhere in between. I write to you specifically because everyday events frequently remind me of the enormous role the United States of America plays in the lives of distant mortals, and because of your unquestioning love for your chosen country that is reflected in the title of your book which has no question mark: What’s so great about America.
No, I don’t hate America. I can’t. Because I was nurtured by T.S. Eliot and Pete Seeger, by Ella Fitzgerald and Sylvia Plath. Because I need Charlie Brown and Alfred E. Neuman in my life. And Audre Lorde, Miles Davis, Paul Simon… How can I shut out Broadway or Hollywood, or, I admit, turn off my television when Friends is on?
But Allen Ginsberg howls in my head: America why are your libraries full of tears? What I thought were ghosts no longer seem so moth-eaten. Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, Yugoslavia: millions killed for flimsy reasons. Angry bombs lobbed at Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon and, for years, at Iraq’s “no-fly zones”: on suspicion, or even as mere distractions. Governments, many elected democratically, destabilised, attacked or compromised: Chile, Nicaragua, Guyana, El Salvador, Guatemala, Grenada, Greece, Indonesia, Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, East Timor, Haiti.
The whole operation, newspapers say / supported by the CIA.
Why does a country perpetually proclaiming the primacy of democratic freedoms repeatedly violate precisely these? Could it, then, be the other way around: because it has such a history of undermining democracy, freedom and human rights in other lands, the United States needs to advertise its virtues so much? We know the supremacy of repeated auto-suggestion over lesser ways of manufacturing consent.
No, I don’t believe America is evil. Partly because every wrong in my McDonald-and-Coke-deprived Indian childhood was blamed on the CIA and its agents, till I almost blamed them for my homework. Partly because it is a nation founded on splendid principles. And partly because of my friend PD in New York. In 1991, he was in an advanced stage of Aids. We cried, we prayed, we cursed our fate and his sexuality, we braced ourselves. Thirteen years later, PD is still teaching students and passionately shooting off letters against “Israeli and American aggression”. He is alive and active only because of America’s excellent healthcare system and social security.
But my gurgling gratitude for America fades into other memories: of America pushing expensive America-made Aids drugs in impoverished African countries reeling from the pandemic, and trying to prevent them from buying cheaper generic options that would save thousands of lives.
And I remember Maria, of Angola. Beautiful Maria with her eyes brimming with dreams. She was born into the thirty-year civil war funded by the United States that destroyed her home, killed her father and crippled her country. But she dreamt on, with the unshakeable confidence of a 22-year-old single mother. Then her 4-year-old daughter died. In her bullet-riddled, caved-in family home I saw Maria’s eyes dry up, and the dreams shy away from the dark night of the soul.
But the horror of 11 September 2001 hushed even America’s harshest critics. Until the “preventive” war against Iraq, based on bogus propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s complicity in 9/11 and his indiscernible WMDs. Amazingly, Saddam is being tried for crimes spanning thirty years, mostly committed when America was his fast friend. America had even helped hush up the Halabja massacre during that period, blaming Iran instead. Reminds you of when America invaded Panama and nailed Noriega – and most of the crimes he was charged with dated back to when he was a close US ally.
I turn and burn./ Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Then suddenly, you have cases like “Rasul vs Bush” and “‘Hamdi vs Rumsfeld” in the Supreme Court. Man to man, about Guantanamo Bay. And magnificently, the court upholds civil liberties over executive arrogance. And we rejoice.
It’s this Janus-faced America that I write to you about. I would like you to recognise what it is like for us non-Americans to face the truth of the downside. America may be great, as your book so affectionately explains, but does it not also need to be good? Don’t you think that to talk about what is great about the US without talking about what is wrong will inflate the country’s most damaging qualities and ultimately hurt it also — though not as much as the rest of us?
Take Afghanistan. A country destroyed because America fought its cold war with the Soviet Union on its soil and in the process created people like Osama bin Laden as it funded, trained and nurtured the Mujahideen.
As you know, back here in your birth country India, these Mujahideen – backed by Pakistan and once glorified by America as “freedom fighters” – have killed about 40,000 people in Kashmir. Curiously, when such “freedom fighters” attacked America they swiftly morphed into “terrorists” who needed to be “smoked out of their caves”. My friend Pradeep Bhatia – talented photographer and proud father of a newborn – who was killed in Kashmir before 9/11, would be happy to know that he had not, after all, lost his life in the course of a freedom struggle but had really been murdered by terrorists.
For decades, America has waged wars, funded insurgencies and trained mercenaries, apparently to ward off the great communist conspiracy that threatened freedom and human rights around the world. Now, it is the conspiracy of Islamic militancy. How long do we lean together, headpiece filled with straw?
Fortunately, not everyone in America is leaning together. There is space for the severe dissent of Noam Chomsky, for the criticisms of Joseph Stiglitz. People like them and other honest professionals – and not the guns-blazing uncle in his top hat – make us admire America once more.
Forty years after the Civil Rights Act, this is the America I would rather see, America as a just nation that lives the democratic freedoms it preaches. Every day, around the world, millions like me pick out fragments of this America – a poem, a song, an argument – from the angry snarl of broken promises and shameless aggression, to embellish our personal worlds. And we remain indebted to an America that is fast becoming invisible.
If it disappears altogether, don’t you agree that the America it leaves behind will be just a shell, a hollow greatness emptied of the integrity and fairness that once recognised moral equality with other countries? Shouldn’t your next book be called What is fair about America – I won’t use a question mark either.
Sincerely,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-letterstoamericans/article_2047.jsp