by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)
Let's start with a smattering of metaphors. The world needs the US like a fish needs a bicycle. Or rather: like a virgin needs a rapist.
There was a time, a century ago, when Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe. Today America might be called the psychopath of the planet.
Or a beehive collapse disorder in the ecology of politics.
Let's try an extended metaphor. America is like Heidegger being a Nazi: how could the begetter of Sein und Zeit, a man of supernatural intelligence, his head full of great ideas … how could he have fallen for all that Germanic-destiny-embodied-in-Der-Fuhrer claptrap? How can we Americans, our heads full of ideas of greatness, our hallowed constitution enshrining the freedom of the individual … how can we go forth and kill foreign individuals by the thousands on a pretty regular basis?
How could Heidegger have thought that ancient Greek and his German were the only languages worth thinking in? How can we think our country is the only indispensable nation worth emulating?
We happen to be the dark id of nations, yet we imagine we're the shiny superego.
We happen to drop more bombs on people than anyone, yet we believe we're crop-spraying the manna of freedom.
We happen to be Darth Vader, but we think we're Luke Skywalker.
Heck, while we're at it, let's carry our metaphors to a vulgar extreme: for the US to have a foreign policy is like putting a vagina on a rock. It seems like an interesting idea, and it softens the idea of a rock, but in the end, a rock is a rock, and who wants to sex it up with a rock?
President Obama is the vagina on our rock. He talks pretty, and looks pretty, even to the hard cases out there, but in the end, America is still a hard rock, whose foreign policy consists of nothing less than killing foreign civilians by the thousands via bombs, drones and guns, or devastating the world economy via Wall Street. Plus we've got over 800 military bases all over the world — staging places to make it easier for us to kill foreigners.
I'm just trying to stick to the facts here. I'm trying to avoid reification — creating a thing out of an abstraction. I'm throwing out metaphors to head-butt our language into the Ding-an-Sich of what we do. We talk about America being all for promoting human rights and freedom — abstractions, abstractions, metaphors, metaphors — but the actual scientifically verifiable real-life strictly-data facticity of our foreign adventures, the realpolitik behind the screen of metaphors, the concrete here-and-now specificity of our being-in-the-world, comes down to this and this alone:
Thousands of dead bodies laid out in the morgues and graves of foreign lands, put there by our soldiers and their weapons.
Our foreign policy is to kill foreigners.
That's it.
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