well, it strikes me that if you condemn America for slavery, you condemn the American people...if you condemn America for generations of racism and sexism, you dondem the people...to blame the State and not the people is balderdash...if the State is responsible it does things either (1) to effectuate the desire of the people or (2) because people cimply acquiesce or (3) force it on people. Now ther eare certain things a government can sneak by (change in regulations pertaining to swampland), but things like racism and sexism and discrimination against the "disabled" the mentally ill, the homeless exist becuase people on the ground either approve or willingly tutn their backs. I blame the American people. What I do not do is privilege the people of Finland or Sweden or France or Mexico. As for "inherently bad about American people," if I had a dime for every time a heard a person on the left (myself included) denigrate the people of the South for their backward bigotted ways, I would be avery rich man. Or maybe denigrate evangelical protestants for being a anti-intellectual anti-rational reactionaries (usually in quite harsh terms). My god, if I had a dime for every time CEOs and management types were "spit" upon for layoffs and worshipping a stock price and shareholdrs for looking only at short term profit, etc. "we" are a lot of different types of people that do all sorts of bad, and sometimes downright evil, things. I just think we are no different from anyone else on the planet. Pessimism of the will.
Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote: eric dorkin wrote: "or perhaps that there is not something inherently bad about the American people?"
This belongs in the same category as those slanders on the anti-vietnam war movement that we spit on GIs when they came home. Who the fuck has ever said that "there is something inherently bad about the American people"? And don't give that shit about "some leftists." Name them and provide an analysis that they constitute a substantial element on the left.
Probably the closest one _could_ come to saying there is something inherently et cetera is to notice that U.S. history (as I alluded to in my phrase "city on the hill") has generated a mass illusion that America is by definition holy, and that only spawn (pawns) of the devil could say otherwise. The Germans were not inherently evil -- but there was no difference between the German People 1933-45 and the American People 1899-2002. Both supported criminal regimes.
Carrol
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