I have no opinion on who runs ANSWER. But what you (and your buddies) completely failed to show back then was how ANSWER runs the peace movement. You can, as I said, have another go at it back in the original thread if you like.
Bush is Hitler; American peace protestors are unamerican:
Well this is obviously two quite unfounded statements. No reasonable observer would say that Bush is as bad as Hitler. He just hasn’t got that kind merits as of yet. No reasonable observer should say that an american is necessarily “un-american” for being against GWII.
december, you’ve reached the ultra-tiresome stage of this debate for me. You’re just grasping at anything to perpetuate the appearance of a debate–and very unsuccessfully at that.
'"…a fair number have done so."
Since you are a statistician aware of the fact that hundreds of thousands of Americans have been involved in protests, and still more have opposed the war less vocally, you know that your links have demonstrated nothing of any statistical significance. Moreover, some of them pertain to the much-ballyhooed remarks of a German official–not to Americans. This is not a debate on whether a handful of people in the world have likened Bush to Hitler. (If you re-read your own OP you’ll remember that your definition of American anit-Americanism was a great deal broader than that!)
Of course name-calling is not an infringement on free speech. Who ever said it was?
That said, you need not apologize for having thought I was being ironical. That was a fair assumption: though in nowise one that ought to have led you down the garden path of a free speech debate that apparently exists in your mind alone.
Randy, december has a lot of time on his hands. May I suggestion concision?
I certainly believe the second statement to be true. I’m less willing to declare the war a “failure” until there is some agreement what the goals were.
You are quite welcome to disagree (or, indeed, agree) with those views. What you have failed to demonstrate, however, is that holding such views are in any way “anti-American”, apart from repeated assertions that it is so.
Well, let’s do the math. We have allegations that one anti-war person was on Saddam’s payroll. We’ll round off that peace march a few months back to an even one million people, and assume that that one person was there.
So current evidence and my calculations suggest that 0.0001% of UK peace protesters might have been on Saddam’s payroll. My God – it’s a conspiracy!
Well, I’m an anti-war person, and I’ve never been a registered member of any political organization whatsoever, unless you count the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, which is nonpartisan. So by december’s logic, all antiwar people are completely apolitical.
The chances of me being in a car crash are very slim. Would you argue that it is paranoid to buckle up? If I get in a car as a passenger and buckle up, am I implying that the driver is a bad driver, because I’m addressing the problem?
The sentence I bolded represents the major hole in your argument, december, both as regards jr8’s statements specifically and the OP as a whole.
To keep it simple, you do a great deal of “assuming” what people think and how they feel. Your entire basis for labelling a statement, a person, or an ideology “anti-American” is your assumptions about what that person’s “real” motivations are.
In the above example, you “guess,” you “assume,” and you refuse to accept any other interpretation than your own. I’d say that your use of “anti-American,” in most instances, represents the same fallacy. In short, you use the term inaccurately more often than accurately.
One can protest the war, one can even believe that the war was “specious,” and that person can still not be anti-American. They are expressing their opinion about a specific event, or perhaps a specific person (Bush, for example), but they can still be respectful to America as a concept and as a nation.
The more you “guess” and “assume” your conclusions, december, the weaker they become.
By december’s standards those guys who wrote The Federalist Papers were really anti-American as they did not trust the government and wanted to limit the powers of the government and even divide what powers it had, checks and balances and all that. How much more distrustful of the government can you get? And they did not even use their real names which just shows you they did not dare speak their minds openly. I am telling you, we have to be vigilant against such anti-American ideas.
No, december, that Stalinists do not run the peace movement. Nobody “runs” the peace movement, for the same reasons that nobody herds cats. It is not at all uncommon for an organization like ANSWER to set a time and place for some sort of demonstration and operate under the sad delusion that they have some real control over the situation, that they can shoehorn other concerns, anything from gay whales to lesbian redwoods, into the proceedings. Thing of it is, nobody really listens to the speeches anyway, they already know why they came.
Its ok with me if ANSWER calls the demonstration, whatever. They can set up a stage and inflict Maya Angelou on the innocent as well. Perhaps a speech from Al Sharpton, if they seek to compel confessions to crimes. It makes no difference.
An anti-war demonstration is the very definition of an ad hoc gathering: we are there because we are against the war. The azaela-growing grandmother standing next to me may agree with me on no other point but! she is there because she is against the war. By no stretch of the imagination can her presence be taken as endorsing any other position.
A Stalinist enforcing discipline on the Peace Movement? It would be worth a month’s pay to see him try.
By definition the concept of Americanism is the operating precepts of the culture of the people of the United States.
Honesty, bravery, courage, kindness, generosity, industry, fairness, justice, and allegiance to a common good, are some of the unifying qualities of the american collective mind. These shared idealized traits are advanced and reinforced by parents, teachers, books, television, movies, and newspapers to all particpants in the States from early childhood until death.
And so, any citizen of the United States who doesn’t subscribe to these values is an American who is anti-american.
And if an American who is anti-american seems unseemly, it is much much worse, it is idicative of an unhappy person who because of circumstantial reasons, no longer marches with his kinsmen toward a common goal, and for a social animal like man, this is anathema and leads to a lonely life without hope.
No! That’s wrong. He can always become a fanatic and hate. Because only by believing the society that rejected him " wrong and evil" can he find personal meaning and worth. The cause that he chooses to champion in this regard is inmaterial, but only through an aspect of fervent anti-americanism can he hope to demostrate his own worth.
Will American anti-americanism persist?
Yes. As established social mechanisms fail because of this new information age of thinkless talk, more and more people will find themselves alienated from the collective american purpose of noble existance.
*Remember “The True Believers” ? It has been reprinted. *
*"And so, any citizen of the United States who doesn’t subscribe to these values is an American who is anti-american.
…
As established social mechanisms fail because of this new information age of thinkless talk, more and more people will find themselves alienated from the collective american purpose of noble existance."*
I wonder if you can possibly be aware how dangerously reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric these statements are.
Honesty, bravery, courage, kindness, generosity, industry, fairness, justice, and allegiance to a common good, are some of the unifying qualities of the american collective mind
Mandelstram:I wonder if you can possibly be aware how dangerously reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric these statements are?
Dangerously? What the swinging heck does that mean Mandestram?
Do noble aims become unspeakable because lying Nazis said similiar things in 1938? Explain your reasoning, God Bless You, and maybe then I can realize that you can distinguist between the two states of reality.
** As established social mechanisms fail because of this new information age of thinkless talk, **
First, there is nothing inherently “American” in your list of virtues. (And I’d be really curious just what “american collective mind” entails–it sounds vaguely like the U.S.S.R. in the 1930s.) So the same traits could be ascribed to any number of other people in Canada, China, Russia, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, or a lot of other places.
In addition, there are people who might meet december’s definition of “anti-American” who would, in fact, be U.S. citizens who displayed all those virtues. Ramsey Clark is certainly a hypercritical individual regarding U.S. politics, but one could not legitimately accuse him of failing in any of those categories.
The only category in which he might be challenged is “allegiance to a common good.” However, that would simply be a judgement call on the part of a person who tried to defame him in that way. Mr. Clark has never indicated a desire to harm the U.S. In fact, he would indicate that he is actually working harder toward the “allegiance to a common good” by holding the U.S. to a higher standard of ethics. Certainly, one can disagree with the philosophical views of his view of ethics, but that is hardly the same as claiming that he does not hold “allegiance to a common good.”
At that point, one simply has chosen to make one’s own personal decisions regarding what the “common good” might be and attempted to impose one’s personal beliefs on another citizen. Therefore, if one holds that any criticism of the president (or the president of one’s own party) is not “allegiance to a common good,” one gets to make the claim that all such criticism is “anti-American.” This is pretty much what totalitarian states have done throughout history, branding criticism of the current leadership as “defamation” and pretending that it is lacking in “allegiance to a common good.”
The U.S. has already experimented with such beliefs on several previous occasions: the Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1790s, the Espionage Act and Sedition Act of 1917 - 1918, and the House Un-American Activities Committee from the 1930s through the 1960s. In each case, historians (and, eventually, either the courts or the public) have recognized that such actions went against the American spirit of freedom of expression and freedom of thought.
This is a great point. Having so many sources of news should have a big impact. One example is the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was first reported by Matt Drudge on the internet. That kind of “warts and all” news can make our leaders seem less noble.
OTOH the information age has helped reduce anti-Americanism by providing news sources that oppose it. E.g., look at the popularity of Rush Limbaugh and Sean hannity. Conservative talk radio, Fox News, and some internet sites have provided a more pro-American slant than the major network news did (for better or for worse).
Another impact of the information age might be to help us see the flaws in other countries. E.g., tomndebb mentioned Ramsey Clark, who is a poster boy for this thread. Clark criticizes the US in comparison to some ideal. We’re not perfect. However, if one compares the US to other countries, then we don’t look so bad.
december, before you pose the question of how the information age will affect “anti-Americanism,” you still have to produce a workable definition of the latter. With the exception of yourself and probably Milum, no one seems comfortable with your definition of the term, which conflates criticism of a given US administration or policy with an anti-American stance. Milum goes a step further and comes up with a core of characteristics which are in themselves unobjectionable but which he arbitrarily elevates to stand for some collective American mind or purpose. He goes further still by casting those who, in the judgment of some as-yet-unspecified arbiters of the American purpose, don’t pass muster, as anti-American. This is, as I said, a very dangerous kind of rhetoric.
As Americans our most primary collective interest is in granting to others the rights and liberties that are guaranteed by the institutions that aim to unify us: the Constitution, and our democratic system of governance. Those rights and liberties include the ability–even the duty–to dissent from elected leaders as we see fit. There is nothing in the least American about regarding leaders as “noble” simply because they are leaders. There is nothing in the least anti-American about about criticism and dissent. Until you acknowledge that all you have is a creed–your own personal civic dogma–not a viable framework in which all of us can be Americans, as we see fit, within the boundaries of the law.
Still waiting for a working litmus test for “anti-Americanism” december. One which doesn’t require assuming conclusions or accepting lack of evidence as evidence.
