If you haven’t already read Mark Steyn’s ode to America and Thanksgiving, give it a read.
The best bit:
…Americans should be thankful they have one of the last functioning nation-states. Europeans, because they’ve been so inept at exercising it, no longer believe in national sovereignty, whereas it would never occur to Americans not to. This profoundly different attitude to the nation-state underpins, in turn, Euro-American attitudes to transnational institutions such as the United Nations.
But on this Thanksgiving the rest of the world ought to give thanks to American national sovereignty, too. When something terrible and destructive happens – a tsunami hits Indonesia, an earthquake devastates Pakistan – the United States can project itself anywhere on the planet within hours and start saving lives, setting up hospitals and restoring the water supply.
Aside from Britain and France, the Europeans cannot project power in any meaningful way anywhere. When they sign on to an enterprise they claim to believe in – shoring up Afghanistan’s fledgling post-Taliban democracy – most of them send token forces under constrained rules of engagement that prevent them doing anything more than manning the photocopier back at the base.
If America were to follow the Europeans and maintain only shriveled attenuated residual military capacity, the world would very quickly be nastier and bloodier, and far more unstable. It’s not just Americans and Iraqis and Afghans who owe a debt of thanks to the U.S. soldier but all the Europeans grown plump and prosperous in a globalized economy guaranteed by the most benign hegemon in history.
That said, Thanksgiving isn’t about the big geopolitical picture, but about the blessings closer to home.
…
Three hundred and 86 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker’s dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.
Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.
Amen.
I think I will take a copy of that column with me to class.
Not because I agree with everything, but because it’s a great example of… American patriotism / exceptionalism.
Your classmates might give it a “slightly” different name. Like American “arrogance” or “egoism”.
Nice to know the thousands of your and my countrymen and women over fighting in Afghanistan are “token” contributions, eh?
Yes,
strange how they don’t say ‘thanks’ for that huh?
So the Steyn decides to get some blubber in his vitriol. I honestly can’t see how a person with his record of expression thinks he has any chance of going for the high tones.
If applying political force abroad is now defined as the foffed-up, poorly planned and varyingly justified excursions we see today then let the US keep on projecting itself. The EU as a concept has nothing to do with a weak-wristed, generally european (that man loves his generalizations, doesn’t he?) tendency to forgo holy nationhood but rather a rationale of “we don’t have that many citizens or a wide gamut of resources, maybe we can try to create something together even though it will be quite a bitch of a struggle?”.
Steyn’s anti-europeanism sticks just as badly to the back of my throat as trite and generalizing anti-americanism. The man is utterly redundant.
Europeans and specimen like Xel simply have lost, or in Xel’s case never acquired, a sense of responsibility for pre-emptive action—-that will always draw criticism from the Lady Astors of the moral universe.
Europe simply is a lightweight, and tsarevitch Putin and the Al Qaeda violent reactionaries will regard it as such—a nugatory symbolic residue of past greatness which has devolved into self-destructive self-castration, like those sects to Diana or Syrian mother-goddesses in the ancient world.
“a sense of responsibility for pre-emptive action—-that will always draw criticism from the Lady Astors of the moral universe.”
More generalizations. Very manly. What is it with some of these guys and male gonads anyway?
Anyway, Iraq isn´t pre-emptive because there is nothing to pre-empt in the first place. There is no functioning rationale.
Afghanistan is not only pre-emptive but responsive and a perfectly ethical invasion. And your Churchillian, responsible and sense-of-blah-blah-acquiring leaders deprioritized these invasions and foffed it up to the same degree as Iraq.
I don’t want your going-to-the-dogs contemptuous sociology bullshit. Next time you want to enlighten 500 million people who can’t be said to be worse/better than another group of 300, please don’t hesitate to bite your tongue. Preferably off.