>>> "M A Jones" <jones118 at lineone.net> 05/22/00 10:04PM >>>
Les Schaffer said:
> Tim Berners-Lee?
Yes, him. A very interesting man. I'd like to respond to Chuck Grimes' observation about nationalism being bandied about; I better 'fess up to my own hidden agenda. I think that there is a strong current of largely unconscious national chauvinism, bordering on xenophobia, in the mainstream US left. It takes the form of both an over-obsession with domestic concerns and issues, and with a patronising attitude towards people, places and struggles which have the 'misfortune' to lie outside US borders. Discussions on some US-based lists, including this one, are absolutely permeated with these vices and with a horrible kind of smugness too, not at all remote from 'my country right or wrong'; even when we're deeply wrong, we're somehow still American and by God, proud of it, No?
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CB: U.S. Left anti-Marxism and anti-communism includes grossly lacking proletarian internationalism, chauvinism that is a descendent of the sellout social democrats, Kautskyists , in the WWI era.
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These chauvinist sentiments (that's what they are, sorry if this gives offence but it has to be said) also sometimes take the form of a thinly-disguised but very specific anti-British feeling, which I take to be the result of a longtime nationalistic competition between two imperialisms, one declining and the other ascendant. This I take to be the objective correlative of an opposite but equivalent (and equally unwarranted) Anglophilia. The net result of this US leftwing chauvinism is to create what to an outsider like myself seems like a very claustrophobic atmopshere, and I don't mind admitting that I don't like it much. Probably it's wrong to be teasing; but what the history of technology clearly shows, and Nathan and Les just showed it again now, is not that, as Doug (wrongly) puts it, 'the US developed other people's ideas because they were too stupid, incompetent etc to do it themselves' (paraphrasing not much) but that knowledge is a seamless spatio-temporal web which involved/imbricates all social, historical and cultural loci. Actually we all owe more to the South Americans who learnt potato-cultivation (presumably they were mostly women) than to any of the militaristic technologies spawned or more probably purloined by/in Britain and the USA in the past 250 years.
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CB: Well, yea but in the larger picture I see the U.S. as the offspring of Britain, a sort of parent/child squabbling these Limey/Yankee fights, but they unite against the rest of the world.
Speaking of South America and American Anglophilia , the U.S. popular opinion spontaneously rallied to at about a 90% level to support the British imperalist war on the Malvenes. Imagine claiming an island of a U.S. ally way across the ocean, and the U.S. backs Britain. The Royal Family and its visicissitudes are followed by many Americans as their own fairy tale kings and queens, as if the American Revolution never happened.
Afterall, we do speak English.