Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: The German Disease Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_german_disease#2289 Post contents: "edgarh" wrote: "...The European quarrels were none of our business then. The fairy tales they use to sort it out today are none of our business today. The same holds true for the Middle East today." But not all "foreign entanglemnts" are alike. What was at stake in WW II was the survival of European civilisation, which is inseparable from American civilisation - although the Cultural Marxists say it's not. (Raising a provocative eyebrow here.) Europe was worth fighting for - well, that is, if we agree that the survival of European civilisation is a vital interest of the USA - but Viet Nam wasn't worth a single US soldier, and neither is Iraq today. Do you REALLY want to posit a qualitative equivalence between America's relationship with Europe and the Middle East? Isn't America's relationship with European civilisation a vital American interest? And far more so than America's relationship with the Middle East? Paradoxically, your suggestion that the affairs of Europe and the Middle East are equally "none of our business", reasserts the neocon premise that the affairs of Israel are of equal concern - or even of greater concern - to America than the affairs of Europe. Although you're calling for radical isolationsism in contrast to the neocons' radical/revolutionary interventionism, you're agreeing with the necons' premise that America's relations with the Middle East are of equal importance with America's relations with Europe. (Or even of greater importance, cf Rumsfeld's idiotic quip dismissing the importance of "Old Europe.") Or more simply, the liberation of Holland was worth some American sacrifice, but the "liberation" of Kurdistan is not. Not to mention the defense of Israel. Yes I AM saying, Britain and France (and Germany for that matter) are (or ought to be) more important to America than Israel. Now, is that so hard to swallow? Hm, now where is it - ah, here. From the chapter titled "1939" in John Lukacs' "Thread of Years": "I am intrigued - intrigued? - no appalled - by the isolationists; and the America Firsters' inconsistency, meaning that they were neither isolationists nor America Firsters at all. Because the same people who in 1940-41 were bitterly against an American policy opposing German domination of the ENTIRE continent after 1945 preached the cause of an American crusade against Russia that was subjugating the eastern part of the continent." ...and look at where THAT interventionism took us! To Viet Nam and Cambodia - a world (and a civilisation) removed from Europe, the motherland of American civilisation, in which America's truest (and most important) vital interests reside. Sent at: 2008 05 16