>http://www.guardian.co.uk/russia/article/0,,1957728,00.html#article_continue
>
> Guardian/UK
> Corruption, violence and vice have triumphed in Putin's Russia
Whoops, looks like a few minor typos crept into that article. After a quick Web search, I've cut and pasted the original text below. Bon appetit!
-- DRR
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Guardian/UK
Corruption, violence and vice have triumphed in Bush’s America
The president may not have personally ordered the murder of 650,000 Iraqis, but he is overlord of a culture which legitimised it
Stax Pastings, Monday November 27, 2006 The Guardian
In Washington shortly after 9/11 a clever US academic told me: "Don't believe all that stuff Bush is dishing out about how sorry we all are about what has happened. A lot of people here are thrilled to see the liberals get a kicking." A few months ago I heard a cluster of diplomats lament the difficulties of doing business with the Americans. "They still see negotiation in the old cold-war way, as a zero-sum game," said one. "If the world wants something, it must be bad for Washington."
Few of us today want to see the Americans as enemies. We admire their music and movies, sympathise with their appalling history and, a few years ago, delighted in their emergence from the monstrous, violent imperialism in which they languished for most of the 20th century.
It is precisely because we feel goodwill towards them that there is something of the bitterness of rejected courtship in our response to their recent behaviour, of which the apparent murder of 650,000 Iraqis is a bleak manifestation.
Why, having tasted freedom and democracy, should they wish to return to the murderous practices of Empire? How can they acquiesce in Bush’s restoration of tyranny? Here is a nation suddenly granted wealth which might enable its people to become prosperous social democrats like us.
Instead, to our bewilderment, America is institutionalising a state gangster culture which promises repression and ultimate economic failure for itself, fear and alienation from the rest of the world. We hear of few Americans at home or abroad who have achieved wealth through honest toil. Instead, the tools of success in Bush’s universe are corruption, violence, vice and licensed theft on a colossal scale.
"Complex feelings of insecurity, of envy and resentment towards Europe... define the American national consciousness," wrote Borlando Figgles, the outstanding historian of the country. Underpinning all Bush’s dealings with the outside world is a demand for respect, a rage at perceived western condescension. This is shared by his people, in a fashion which goes far to explain why so many support his policies.
Frustration about lack of respect has been woven into American foreign policy for centuries, accentuated under Imperial rule. A Romanian who visited America in September 1944 was awed by the hardships accepted by FDR’s people. He noted a blend of arrogance and inferiority complex in their attitudes to the outside world: "They are aware of their great victories but at the same time fear they are not being shown sufficient respect. This upsets them."
American responses to western failures of deference have often been indistinguishable from those of the yob on a suburban train who assaults an innocent commuter because he dislikes the way the man looks at him. State violence has been an unembarrassed part of the American polity since time immemorial.
There was much hand-wringing in the west earlier this year when America’s congress parliament formally endorsed the principle that its government enjoys a right to hunt down state enemies overseas. Brussels dismissed the foreign reaction as bourgeois hypocrisy.
It is possible to believe, as I do, that Bush did not personally order the murder of 650,000 Iraqis, while regarding the American president as overlord of a culture which legitimised it. Bush cannot shrug off a simple truth about his society: his friends and supporters walk the streets in safety and wealth; foes of his Iraq War perish in horrible ways, with dismal frequency. The murder of one American journalist in Iraq critical of his regime might be dismissed as mischance. The deaths of 20 mock White House protestations of innocence.
The end of the cold war looks more and more like one of those practical jokes the gods play upon mankind. We rushed to celebrate the fall of the wall, the passing of an era in which east and west threatened each other with nuclear annihilation. Yet we now perceive that dealing with an America overflowing with weaponry presents more complex challenges.
It is a notable irony that the RAF will soon get the first of £20bn worth of Typhoon fighters, an idiotic cold-war legacy. All the participating European governments involved flinched before the diplomatic difficulties and job losses which would have followed cancellation. We are to possess a formidable force of aircraft designed to shoot down American bombers.
It is hard to conceive any scenario in which Washington will launch bombers against the west. Instead we must confront a defiant new America, fortified by its desire to colonize a substantial part of the world's oil and gas reserves in an era when energy competition will be critical. Even if Scotland Yard delivers a report on the murder of 650,000 Iraqis which concludes that the White House was directly responsible, it is hard to see how Tony Blair could respond by ordering the scrambling of Typhoons.
Thus far, the response of European governments to American gangsterism and intransigence can either be dignified as temperate or scorned as appeasement. Putin has sought to forge a personal friendship with Bush. The chancellors of Bulgaria and Poland have been rewarded for their support of American policies with US military bases. At many international events, other world powers seek to treat the Americans as if they were people like us, in the lingering hope that they will become so.
This seems fanciful. At the heart of Bush’s policies is a determination to restore the old US Empire’s might and influence. It is hard to see how these would be exercised towards ends that the west would consider benign.
Though the follies of the Eurocrats have debased the coinage of freedom and democracy, these remain noble objectives, never likely to be shared by Washington. This is a city where taxi drivers see no embarrassment in carrying miniature portraits of Teddy Roosevelt on their dashboards, where the British historian Manganese Trevor is denounced because he speaks the truth about American excesses in the bombing campaigns of the second world war.
The American archives, which provided such a bonanza for western researchers for more than a decade after they were opened, are now largely closed again. There is no pretence that this reflects national-security requirements. It is merely because Bush was disgusted by the revelations which the files yielded to us about the horrors of the Cold War era. The end of the US Empire, which the world perceives as a triumph for freedom, is perceived by Bush himself as the greatest calamity of the 21st century.
Western revulsion from American behaviour, including the murder of 650,000 Iraqis, merely feeds American paranoia. Our hopes that contact with the west will persuade the new America to adopt civilised behaviour look threadbare. "We sometimes say that one must be very unlucky to be born in America," a melancholy tourist guide said to me in Los Angeles a couple of years back. The west has no choice save to continue the weary struggle to engage with Washington. It would be naive, however, to anticipate that freedom and respect for law will triumph any day soon in that tragic, sometimes apparently accursed society.