November 9, 2020 - 11:40am
Fireworks erupted in London last weekend, according to The Hill and ABC News, in celebration of Joe Biden winning the US election.
WATCH: Fireworks in London, Edinburgh as Biden win celebrated abroad https://t.co/dqPLRPso6i pic.twitter.com/xAOzXP79AU
— The Hill (@thehill) November 8, 2020
ABC has since deleted its version of the story, after being roundly mocked by for not knowing that fireworks are often heard in England around the fifth of November, for reasons unrelated to American electoral politics. But the moment left behind a distinct impression that despite taking a battering in recent years, reports of the death of American exceptionalism have been greatly exaggerated.
Nowhere is this truer than among those keenest on critiquing this exceptionalism. The 21st-century critical theory left is now increasingly dominant in the US liberal mainstream (check out the vice-president elect’s pronouns in her Twitter bio), and those who embrace this worldview are fond of warning about the dangers of universalising a dominant worldview. We must, for example, ‘decentre whiteness’, ‘decolonise the curriculum’ and ‘check our privilege’ — all exhortations to set a hegemonic perspective in parentheses and consider power dynamics which could stifle the inclusion of less well-amplified voices in a debate.
This is in many respects wise counsel, and disregarding it has historically led to cruelty and oppression. So it’s all the more striking to discover such a jarring lack of reflexivity in this worldview. Instead, a defining characteristic of America’s emerging ‘woke’ cultural elites is a reluctance to analyse on its own terms their own desire to spread an anti-imperialistic worldview beyond American borders.
This propensity was at work a week ago, as Liam Duffy noted in these pages, in the American liberal media’s determination to export its particular preoccupations to Macron’s increasingly hardline stance on militant Islam. This was typified in the New York Times’ response to the decapitation of Samuel Paty, which seemed more nervous about ‘rising nationalism’ than an increasingly militant Islamism.
Everyone, worldwide, must of necessity be as fixated on the triumph of American good over American evil as Americans are themselves. Other culturally specific anxieties, celebrations or political priorities can only become intelligible inasmuch as they’re relativised from the ‘neutral’ American standpoint.
It’s probably an inescapable feature of empires that they use their soft (and sometimes hard) power to export their cultural values across their sphere of influence, and America is no exception. Despite an apparent waning of aspirations to cultural imperialism in recent years, the instinct to evangelise ideologically seems as strong as ever.
But perhaps we should see this not as a bug but a feature. After all, it keeps the international artillery of American ideological imperialism humming, while providing the justification for takeover of that engine by new political interests, in the name of anti-imperialism. Those of us who live elsewhere, and occasionally set off fireworks for reasons unrelated to American politics would perhaps do well to watch what the new, incoming anti-imperialist imperials do, rather than what they say.
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SubscribePerhaps we would be best served by trying to dismantle their Empire as they dismantled ours.
Well we shall see. Some commentators that I respect – Tim Pool, Jimmy Dore and sytxhexenhammer666 – predict that Biden will fulfil his mission and return to the Obama years by starting a few more conflicts in the ME. As Jimmy Dore always say, Obama came to power with two wars and left with seven. Hey-ho…
I can see how dangerous the results of this election are for the Middle East with an enriched, empowered and emboldened Iran feeding and fueling hate and violence.
” If President Donald Trump is finally edged out, the recent startling prospects for peace in the Middle East may well be extinguished by the hideous prospect of a terrible war.
Those who most threaten the Jewish people, as well as the peace of the world, have been banking on Joe Biden winning the presidency.
He has said he will reactivate the Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew the United States. This would open the cash spigots for the Iranian regime, ending the financial pressure under which it has been weakened.
It would instead be enabled to resume its regional power grab, ramp up its attacks on Israel through its Palestinian and Lebanese proxies, and speed up its development of nuclear weapons with which it intends to wipe out Israel and attack the west. War between Iran and Israel would become much more likely.
There would also be a domino effect in the Arab world. The unprecedented moves by the Gulf states to normalise relations with Israel have been driven principally by their perception that Trump was determined to neutralise Iran, and that their interests therefore lay in an alliance with Israel and America.”
Melanie Phillips.
Instead, a defining characteristic of America’s emerging ‘woke’ cultural elites is a reluctance to analyse on its own terms their own desire to spread an anti-imperialistic worldview beyond American borders.
you’re just now discovering the left’s lack of self-awareness? I guess that’s progress.
By the way, the American left has ALWAYS had a blind spot re: militant Islam. We’ve been lectured about creeping Islamophobia since 9/11, yet year after year, the most abundant crop of bias-related incidents is perpetrated against Jews. Not that this is surprising. Among the left, that has always been an acceptable bigotry.
Globally, Christians are the most persecuted group.
And globally, the most likely to persecute. See, for instance, the current murderous anti-gay death squads in Uganda (33 killed in 2020 alone) and elsewhere in East Africa, and the Catholic Church’s universal campaign against equality in marriage, adoption et al.
“globally, the most likely to persecute”
Any proper statistics to back that up Mark, say in comparison to what’s happening to the Chinese Muslims and Tibetans or homosexuals, Christians, Jews and Zoroastranians in the ME and North Africa.
Moderate writers far more distinguished than myself – Christopher Hitchens for example – with massive knowledge and experience of both the modern world and world history often describe(d) christianity as two millenia of atrocious and murderous vileness. CH famously used to say that putting a bible in a child’s hand was a more severe abuse than inserting a ***** in its mouth.
Our anti-imperialists have thrown statues in the harbour rather than invest in non-European businesses. They have bullied innocent lecturers and journalists, rather than humbly apologising to Easterners for 19th century Left-wing imperial excesses.
So far they have taken the easy route. I am not confident that they will change.
What do you mean by 19th Century left-wing imperial excesses? I’m intrigued!
I think he means communism
Generally the liberal ascendancy in politics from the 1820s up to 1857. The EIC uplifting Indian societies without asking them first (sometimes ok, sometimes not), whilst displaying a corruption that outraged even hardened imperialists like Napier (definitely not ok). Throw in the laissez-faire obsession of the late 19th century that starved enough Indians in famine-time to outraged hardened conservatives like Robert Cecil (who subsequently ended one particular famine in the 1870s), and it is easy to see liberals that drive empires into rebellion, and who take brilliant ideas like social progress, free trade and light-touch governance only to ram them into the ground repeatedly. The tories under Disraeli voted against the Opium Wars which the liberal Palmerston allowed to happen out of a dogmatic free-trade obsession that the father of free trade, Richard Cobden, saw as pointless and unnecessary.
Throw in Charles Fox’s admiration for the Napoleonic empire (while we were at war with it no less!), and the genuine liberal triumphs of prison and education reform have a bit of a long blood-red shadow behind them.
Now one might ask why any of that matters now? Well, the left likes top-down change. Slow organic change by native peoples offends them.
So, just as when they unseated native princes because they weren’t changing fast enough, so now do they perform the hypocritical volte face of accusing our native workers of being “racists” for not embracing the latest fads of the day. When a native Brit opposes unlimited immigration (imperial rulers are good at importing populations to dilute the opinions of natives), now they too are ignored and banished to the “deplorables” pages of the guardian. Not to mention the conspiracy of silence over Rotherham, and the siphoning off of our sovereignty to the EU (what is French for “vassal state”?). Oh, and alot of anti-colonialist rulers in the commonwealth supported Britain to the hilt over the Falklands War, explicitly condemning Argentine imperialism. Where were our brave marxist anti-colonial liberals? Condemning Britain’s “jingoistic” desire to defend her own people (looking at YOU Tony Benn!).)
Yeah, yeah, they don’t like the British Empire. Well, they were the ones that generally forced the conservatives to step in to quell unrest and liberal tyranny (unlike the EIC, the conservative Raj did not end in mass-mutiny), and their successors have spent the past few decades telling alot of natives over here how they should live without consulting them at all!
They claim to be different these days, but some of them still display the same old top-down “do as I say” imperialistic values.
So we have new masters now.
As their leader seems to be backing both the Irish & the EU – it looks like bad news for Britain.
Bad news for the Brexiters, not Britain as a whole. An American trade-deal’s not that important, but maybe not getting one will hasten our inevitable return to the EU
Speaking of the American left and the Western left altogether this truth-telling site provides the entire corpus of their critique of both US and Western imperialism.
http://www.thirdworldtravel…