“The Way The World Looks”
Richard hits on an important point when he writes:
This is certainly true, but I think that Luttwak might be giving a bit too much credit to the Obamaniacs (not the undeceived Obamacons, like myself). They don’t so much confuse the potential reactions of East Africans with Muslims to an Obama presidency as conflate most all Third World people into one big happy “they’re not white or Asian” soup.
This is right, but I think Richard also gives them too much credit, as well, since I think they assume that Asians and white Latin Americans will also be thrilled by Obama’s election. Thus you had Roger Cohen
citing a former Mexican foreign minister waxing ecstatic: “My sense is the symbolism in Mexico of a dark-skinned American president would be enormous. We’ve got female leaders now in Latin America - in Chile, in Argentina. But the idea of a U.S. leader who looks the way the world looks as seen from Mexico is revolutionary.” That’s the key--the way “the world” (not including the Mexican ruling class!) looks. My guess is that those white autonomists in eastern Bolivia will not be terribly enthusiastic about an Obama victory, and they won’t be alone. As I have said before there is scarcely a more disrespectful, condescending attitude towards the rest of the world than the assumption that they can be bought off or won over with something as superficial as a U.S. President with a mixed racial background. If the Obama fans actually believe their candidate has some legitimate policy changes to introduce, that might be a reason for other nations to respond favorably to him, but on the whole the changes on offer are, like so much else in this campaign, symbolic and aesthetic. In the end, Obama fans project their own fantasies about “racial reconciliation” into the international sphere, implicitly likening the majority of the world to our minority populations, which is to belittle them a second time. This relieves them of the obligation to critique seriously U.S. foreign policy, which is the source of some significant part of anti-U.S. animus, since they have already concluded that America’s reputation can be repaired in some measure simply through the election of one man.
Comments
It’s just as likely that South Americans and Arabs will develop a new contempt for America if we elect a black president. This whole “brown skin” solidarity idea—i.e. Pakistanis, Hispanics, and half-Africans all working together-- has got to be one of the more stupid ideas coming out of PC-land.
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Arabs will develop a new contempt for America if we elect a black president.
Amen, Mr. Spencer. I thought Bush was crazy to have Condi Rice trying to talk Turkey to, well, Turkey and Arab state/peoples in the M.E. With all of his Jacobinite plans, Bush could not have made a worse choice.
Does he think Arabs value blacks and women and consider them equal to men and Arabs?
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So we arent all related to Noah like the bible says??
Where then did people of other colors come from? Isnt Shem a son of Noah that gave rise to semites [Jewish, Arabs]?? What about Noahs son Ham? And Japheth?
Funny how people throw out the bible when it doesnt fit their ideology.
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Obama is black. So there will be a different perception. Since America hasn’t had an unblemished president ever, it’s not hard to imagine how he will be pilloried because he is black when he stumbles. Despite this Americans who are supporting him, as a whole, seem to have an IQ higher than the average and probably understand this. And he is the frontrunner, so maybe he’s just better than the two other options - it isn’t as if there is really a lot of choice now. But the most important thing is not what the Obama supporters think he will do or that Obama will himself change the world, rather that the world will see that Americans are willing to elect a man of mixed race. Their view of Americans will change - and it will be a vast change from the image they have after Bush.
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This idea that his blackness will be some great help may matter a little in Europe, which has embraced the leftist narrative that the entire West is only now redeeming itself, previously characterized in its core values by an unbroken chain of evils stemming from the Crusades, serfdom, slavery, nationalism, and culminating in the Holocaust. America taking this step may matter to them and give us some moral credibility that it lacks, as they have now made us co-responsible for the Holocaust and equally evil because of the alleged Holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In other words, it is important for Germany, collaborationist France, and other European nations to drag us down to their moral level, and the way to do that is by making a big deal about slavery and alleged US complicity in the Holocaust.
But our wealth, power, foreign policy, and distinctiveness will continue to annoy and anger the Third World, and there are enough internal divisions--between Shia/Sunni, tribe and tribe, Protestant and Catholic--that a minority leader of the U.S. won’t mean much. They’re much more concerned with whether an ethnic Chinese has too much power in Indonesia or whther the new leader of Bolivia is an Indian to care about our own parochical concerns. Plus the popular conspiracy thinking of the Third World will make them think he’s just a puppet anyway, like the old Rajs under the British in India.
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“......America hasn’t had an unblemished president ever......”
Well, except for Jeff Davis......
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