Need the US consider
the Consequences of its Lawlessness in the World?
Frank A.
Jones
4/25/05
Last week, the UN labeled America an abuser of its war combatants; they further said that the US tends to think it has the right to operate above and outside the law. Indeed, operating outside the law may be seen by this nation's failure to join the World Court, which has just about all nations, except the USA.
Molly Ivins argues that the USA is not a part of the World Court because we have several war criminals we are sheltering. The most obvious is Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State. Were we to join the World Court, as other civilized nations have, we would have to stop sheltering our own war criminals.
Because of his international status, our own Dr. Kissinger does not travel out of the USA much, and he is very careful about the countries he travels to, lest he finds himself held as former American-supported Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet was; he was indicted and held in Europe for crimes against humanity. Henry Kissinger could be similarly held to stand trial for crimes that have been documented against him in Chile, Cambodia, and Laos during the Vietnam War.
America's lawlessness in the world is not new; as far back as Martin Luther King, Jr., and as recent as Nelson Mandela, America has been labeled by these and other august men, as the greatest threat to world peace today.
Shouldn't fair-minded and responsible Americans ask themselves and this nation a few questions: How can a nation that professes to be law-abiding continue to flaunt the just laws of the world and think that world, ever so militarily weak it may be, will consider it a credible world player? Can military superiority dictate the terms of true morality? Will a nation's military power long endure and continue to delude it into thinking that might really does does make right?
America is seen and is, in fact, too self-possessed and fixated on itself. Such fixation is pathological and causes a people to operate in a vacuum of their own set of standards, apart from the world. That action breeds an unhealthy national behavior among its people; it breeds a sense of privilege unearned and despised by others. Anyone can see that the attitude of privilege degenerates into duplicitous behavior; it gives the assumption that a militarily powerful nation can function by its own set of rules in a world of others and yet be true to itself.
This form of nation-schizophrenia* will be instilled in its people; they will think the world is wrong if it does not perceive things and situations as they perceive them. That may be where the USA is today. For the world says, through the UN, that America is an abuser of war combatants and international law; the world says and sees, through the World Court, that we are a lawless nation. Yet we travel throughout the world pointing to the peccadilloes of others, as if our own moral house is in order. We may be so self-deceived that we actually think others are not laughing at us and our schizophrenia.
A nation's world duplicity is a form of nation sickness that eventuates into that behavior and mindset of its people. That may not be where we are; that is where America is, as we search mindlessly for the causes of corporate corruption, the inequities experienced by many of citizens, the violence of our nation, etc. The national character of a nation is seen in that nation's actions, not in its words.
America has many lofty words about itself and its character, but its behavior is often in glaring contradiction to its words. Still we do not see ourselves; we just hear our words and think that is who we are. But the world is not similarly deaf nor blind as we are to our real national character.
Frank A. Jones
4/25/05
____________
* Telling itself it is an ethical nation, a
force for good in the world, a moral, religious nation, etc., but behaving
outside the just laws of the world.
