On May 27, 2010, at 7:50 AM, Brian Swale wrote:
> What he wrote enabled me to make sense of what seemed to me to be the
> persistent meddling (very often violent) of one country in the
> affairs of so
> many countries all around the world.
I wonder if Chomsky mentioned a particular bend in U.S. history toward
the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries where a huge
political firestorm erupted and continued for many years concerning
the role of the U.S. in the world. There was a faction that cleaved to
an old notion that this new nation rather than following in the
footsteps of the Old World powers from which it sprang, should become
a, for lack of a better word, beacon for a new, more stable and
peaceful way of doing things. Interestingly, it was the Republican
party which held this view the strongest. The other view, more
memorably put forth by such luminaries as Teddy Roosevelt and Henry
Cabot Lodge, was that the emergent U.S. should take its rightful place
as a power, and meddle where meddling was "necessary"; that is, take
the Old World point of view and simply do it better. (You might recall
the Spanish-American War, and the subsequent unpleasantness in the
Philippine Islands.) Sadly (second post in a day using that word), the
Roosevelts and Lodges won the argument and we wound up with a
president named McKinley instead of one named Thomas B. Reed.
Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower gives a fascinating, well documented
and rather objective account of this period as part of a larger
history of the world between 1880 and 1914. Highly recommended.
I don't think any of them ever picked up anything made by Olympus.
Well, Tuchman might have. <g>
--Bob Whitmire
www.bobwhitmire.com
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