[link|http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000066.html|Better us than anyone else].

Excerpt:

When all is said and done, discussions of power and morality seem to hinge around a single idea \ufffd or rather two conflicting ideas regarding the nature of power.

Those that would have us disarm, withdraw, apologize and retreat make the assumption that by removing American Power from the world, the planet will become a harmonious village of diversity and mutual respect. Remove American capitalism, and the world\ufffds people will trade solar cars for indigenous beads, our European moral betters will hand over their cash to the third world until all are perfectly equal, and everyone will live in a sustainable ecological paradise. Remove American cultural power and Britney will be replaced with Beethoven, and an exquisite and reasonably priced Pate de Foi Gras Existentialist Meal can be had at a corner drive in where the former McDonald\ufffds once stood.

This is utter nonsense. It has never been true for a single page of the history of the Damned Human Race. There has never \ufffd never \ufffd been a day in human history when some form of power has not flooded the world, or competed to do so; and those times when the power was most one-sided reveal themselves to be the times of greatest relative peace, stability, and advancement of that quaint notion known as civilization.

This is not merely a European construct. We see this iron rule in Inca and Aztec histories in South America, in Shaka\ufffds Zulu nation, in Chinese empires and Japanese Shogunates, Native American tribal relations, and wherever else we turn our eyes.

The idea that all would be well if only America would retreat from the world and stay at home is a pernicious and seductive one. It appeals not only to those that hunger after the freedom to do mischief in our absence as it does to our natural sense of isolationism. It has been the mantra of communists, totalitarians and elitists of every vile stripe for well over a hundred years. It is utterly and completely wrong. Political power has never been removed from the world \ufffd it has only been replaced. And so our choice \ufffd now pay attention you No Blood For Oil types \ufffd is not between power and no power. It is a choice only of what kind of power will fill that vacuum. Chinese? Russian? European? We have seen all of these before. The horrors they have inflicted, with far less absolute power than the US wields, do not leave me pining for those alternatives. Someone is going to be the world power, or tear the world apart fighting for it. And no matter how hard we may wish it, the winner will not be a Blindfolded Jury of Archangels.

That is an unpleasant realization. It does not bestow glory on the human animal. Mark Twain:

\ufffdI am the only man living who understands human nature; God has put me in charge of this Branch Office; when I retire there will be no one to take my place. I shall keep doing my duty, for when I get over to the other side, I shall use my influence to have the human race drowned again, and this time drowned good, no omissions, no Ark.\ufffd

We have some very hard decisions to make as a nation, and as a people \ufffd and we have to make them, now. There is no perfect power. There is only human power. History shows that the best we can hope for is that the most decent, least flawed power \ufffd the British, for example \ufffd will, despite their horrors and massacres, displace people who are far, far worse.

It\ufffds really that simple.

We have to face the fact that we are imperfect creatures; that as long as there remain brutal and savage dictatorships power is not something that can or should be put down or put away, because power dispersed among hundreds of millions of fundamentally decent people displaces and curtails the murders and genocides of those forces that would rush in to fill their place.

We must face the hard and bitter truth that good people can walk away from a fight, but when they do, bad people will have the field and we have seen the horrors they can inflict.

For there are indeed good people and bad people. We have been, on the whole, the best-behaved, most generous and benign power in the history of the world. But we have had our Ft. Pillows and our Wounded Knees, our Moro Craters and Dresdens and My Lais. We are not immune, no matter how deeply and fervently so many of us wish we were.

We are Twain\ufffds people: fallible, often greedy, prone to vanity and pride over our institutions and successes. We are all this and more. We have committed bloody acts and disgraced our flag and our honor, and written shameful pages in a history that cannot be erased.

Face it.

We have to. We have to do it, now, openly, honestly. We have to look our weakness and our sins full in the face, and accept them, and unlike past occupiers of this position, unlike, for example, the Japanese who still refuse to face their responsibilities in World War II, we must undergo \ufffd daily if necessary \ufffd the painful and humiliating airing of our worst excesses, and stare right in the face the reflection of our own flawed nature.

But unlike our hand-wringing, self-loathing, paralyzed elites, we must do this not to become immobilized with shame and doubt, but rather to have the confidence and moral clarity needed to be able to act when action is essential, to act when all others are paralyzed by the shame of unexamined atrocities, to act when only action can save this world from the relentless drag of human entropy that cannot abide creativity, freedom, tolerance and success.

Because now, at this moment, this fulcrum point in history, we need American power more desperately and urgently than at any time in memory. And we cannot allow the past errors of a fundamentally decent, generous and kind people to prevent us from acting at this critical moment where inaction and paralysis could doom the world.

I say:

"Jingoism" is relative. It says we're better than the rest. And all things considered, damned if we aren't. Western civilization is better than non-Western. Anglophone civilization is better than the rest of the West. And the United States is the undisputed leader of Anglophone civilization. This all happens to be the truth. If it makes you uncomfortable, that's your problem.

A loyal opposition can harp on our failings all they like as far as I'm concerned, provided they face these two obvious facts: 1. all things considered, we're still way better, and 2. that gives us not only the right, but the responsibility, to take charge of this benighted planet before someone else does. Anyone who denies these is not loyal, he's merely opposition. And a liar to boot.

All those treaties arising from a fetishization of the notion of balance of power, helped turn a Serbian assassination into a global conflagration. And now the transnational progressivists want to sacrifice our world on that same altar. I'd rather try a theory that hasn't been refuted by history, if you don't mind.

Simplistic fulminations yerself. You give me self-superior blather about balance, and flame me for suggesting that maybe we should choose our centroid with some care.

Oh, and by the way: Western style democracy is the closest thing to balance this world has ever seen. There is no such thing as a balance between balance and imbalance.

You're full of bullshit, Ash. Bullshit buttressed by a studied incoherence. No wonder your sentence structure is so awful. It reflects the state of your thought processes all too well.