If We Fixed this One Thing about Our Blinkered View of the World, Happy Things Would Follow — a Comment about an Insightful Essay by Richard Falk

10 March 2012

The problem with American quasi-imperialistic militarism is that it motivated by a delusional blindness which necessarily mandates its own eventual and inglorious defeat

I do not like seeing our troops killed, maimed, and psychologically damaged for the perfidious reasons that America’s ignorant and mostly dishonorable leadership says they must be.

With President Obama now blithely warmongering regarding Iran — and Republican candidate Mitt Romney trying to outdo him in pandering blood lust — it is as if Murderous Delusion has seized the American nation.

The question is why.

One answer — Richard Falk’s essay about American Imperialism’s blinkered eyes

Though painful for patriotic Americans to read, Richard Falk’s short essay should be mandatory reading for all our political and military leaders:

Richard Falk, Quran burning: Mistake, crime, and metaphor, Al Jazeera (09 March 2012)

“Pete, who is this guy Falk? And why should we care what he thinks?”

Richard Falk is the kind of accomplished human being that America’s proudly ignorant (and offensively arrogant) political Right will immediately ignore, based on the delusory perceptual blindness that Professor Falk attacks.

Falk is a retired professor of International Law at Princeton University and currently a visiting professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. In March 2008, the United Nation’s Human Rights Council appointed him to a 6-year term as a UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

We should consider Professor Falk’s opinion about international affairs because it insightfully explains why the United States has created problems for itself — in the Islamic world specifically — and, more generally, wherever else America has unnecessarily put its culturally ignorant feet, at times when its survival was not actually at stake.

What Professor Falk wrote about burning Korans at Bagram Air Base — implications about America’s imperialistic mentality

What set Professor Falk off was:

the strategic stupidity of burning Korans in the first place,

and

the United States’ blindly arrogant response to having done so.

(I have previously addressed this subject, but from different perspectives, here and here.)

For Americans who want the United States to be geopolitically effective in the world, Professor Falk’s perspective is worth understanding:

One would have supposed that a vigilant imperialism would have understood that any disrespect towards the Quran, whether public or private, delivers a severe blow against the US mission in Afghanistan.

At least with US troops, such an experience would have led to introducing the most rigorous means to train and discipline occupation forces accordingly.

It is not an exaggeration to say that such displays of disrespect for the Quran are more serious setbacks than dramatic defeats on the battlefield.

Why? Because it so clearly discredits the US claim to be a humanitarian benefactor by its presence in Afghanistan.

Professor Falk’s take on America’s curious reaction to its Koran-burning mistake

Although President Obama apologized to Afghanistan’s President Karzai, he significantly weakened his apology by indirectly telling the Afghanis that the apology was necessary to protect American lives.

Perhaps the President’s waffling was understandable, given Republican candidate Rick Santorum’s inflammatorily stupid statement that President Karzai and Afghanistan should apologize to the United States for murderously retaliating after the Koran-burning mistake.

Former Senator Santorum’s statement exemplifies what is geopolitically ineffective in American thinking

How would we react to foreign occupiers who burned the Bible? And afterward told us to apologize to them for effectively having made them do so?

The United States’ reversal of the Golden Rule is so ethically preposterous that Professor Falk wonders why American foreign policy is so obtusely insensitive to it:

[T]he truth is that the imperial mindset is utterly incapable of comprehending the logic of reciprocity.

Who is at fault in this mess?

Falk draws the same “blame” conclusion I always have. War puts decent people into situations where inhumanity and barbarity are foreseeably going to rule. Beginning wars is almost always a bad idea. Leaders who advocate armed engagements are, therefore, at fault for the predictable atrocities which follow.

The moral? — Geopolitically effective patriotism requires that we understand and implement the Golden Rule more often than we do

It would be helpful if we stopped being so easily diverted by trumped-up fear, blind anger, and concealed greed.

That is, of course, a tall order, given the animalistic nature of important components of the human brain. The physiological challenge of acting reasonably may explain Lord Acton’s famous (1887) aphorism to the effect that:

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Ironically, popular culture seems to have forgotten the famous moralist’s companion comment:

Great men are almost always bad men.

Therefore, as a pragmatic person who is concerned with encouraging actually achievable results, my admonition would be to the American public, rather than to its ambitiously greedy leaders:

For purposes of preserving our sons and daughters’ military lives, let us wise up about the killing rage that we create abroad, when we act in imperiously blind opposition to the Golden Rule.

There is a difference between a great nation and a great power. The former acts in accord with simple morality more often than the latter. It is difficult to respect the reasoning of a democratic people, who willingly give up the first for the second.

PeteFree.com

If We Fixed this One Thing about Our Blinkered View of the World, Happy Things Would Follow — a Comment about an Insightful Essay by Richard Falk