Today the USA and France illegally bombarded the sovereign nation of Libya for no apparent reason. I guess I feel the responsibility to address this issue falls on my shoulders seeing as the mainstream media is militaristic and imperialist in the extreme. I seem to remember that since day one Americans proclaimed "9/11" to be a tragedy. And yet they continue to unleash mass death and destruction on everyone else with no remorse. As a longtime defender of the USA I am very disturbed by this turn of events. Outside of America the USA is hailed as an evil imperialist power which is responsible for radicalizing many elements of Muslim societies as well as, most importantly, killing millions of civilians over the last couple decades. Nobody likes a bully, and the USA is the world's biggest bully. In Europe I always find myself trying to defend the big bully because "he is a nice person" - i.e. the USA is internally liberal and used to be a bastion of freedom on Earth. But increasingly I find myself sounding like the woman who defends her abusive husband. "He's really a good person, he can change, he wasn't always like this..." is what we hear from all these poor women. And this is exactly what I sound like when I speak about the US.
Events like these in Libya bring me close to breaking point. The bully keeps pushing others around, beating them indiscriminately, and yet I am still on his side. At one point this has got to stop...
Furthermore, after acting like this why do Americans get offended by world leaders like Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro saying it like they see it and calling America an imperialist power? Clearly America
is an imperialist power.
What no one seems to remember is that all empires collapse.
Isn't it a commonly accepted conclusion that, as
Issac Asimov said,
"violence is the last refuge of the incompetent"?
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