O Intermitente<br> (So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

O Intermitente
(So long, farewell, auf weidersehen, good-bye)

quarta-feira, agosto 06, 2003

Varieties Of Anti-Americanism

[1] The first kind (...). Outside the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia and other democratic nations, most of the world's governments are still run by elites, that is classes of people who run governments like family businesses - for their own good and profit. Sometimes these elites are the residues of various pre-industrial aristocracies such as the rulers of the Arab world. In other cases these elites are composed of the remains of revolutionary movements such as the Communist parties in China and Vietnam. Occasionally, these elites are composed of wealthy families and landowners. And sometimes they are the descendants of the native functionaries of various colonial empires.

(...) These elitists hate America because America, with its free society, democratic government and capitalist economy is a threat to them. American freedom and the American way of life threaten every elite and oligarchy on the planet. Even a whiff of American-style freedom can bring down a moth-eaten oligarchy, as the fate of the Soviet Union proved. The world's oligarchs and elitists - and the intellectuals whose paychecks they sign - are scared to death of us. In typical fashion they hate what they fear, namely us.


[2] The second variety (...) is that of the world's traditionalists, that is people who love their traditional cultures and histories. These people rightly see America as the source of the modern world they hate and fear, the modern world that is slowing replacing the traditional ways of life they love.

(...) This includes the modern political system of a constitutional democracy (or a constitutional republic) as well as the modern economic system (capitalism), mass entertainment, mass communications, modern industry, most modern science, and most modern technology. (...) A world they neither like nor understand. They fear that America is changing and remaking the face of the globe in its own image and that they have no choice in the matter.


[3] The third variety (...) is all manner of ?intellectuals? and leftists. (...) American has proven that capitalism works. Our combination of democracy, popular culture, and mass communications disproves most of the theories they believe in: Marxism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and Racism etc. (...) America is despised because our real-life success story makes their utopian dreams, for which they are willing to sacrifice everything, to be nothing but hollow mockeries. They loathe us because the average people of the world are too busy watching Baywatch, playing video games and listening to ?Eminem? to listen to their glorious plans for revolution and utopia. They are jealous because average people want - and for the most part have - pickup trucks and TV sets instead of Communism and the Islamic Paradise.
posted by Miguel Noronha 8:30 da tarde

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"A society that does not recognize that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom."
F.A.Hayek

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