Open letter to 58 million Americans, from a European

[WilliamPitt]

Got this via email, with the following message:

Sir,

I am a european citizen still trying to coming to grips with what happened 2 days ago. I have just read your "Still Standing, Still Fighting, Still Here" and appreciate it, because it reminds me that there are americans beyond the fatidic 58 million. I know, there are 55 million, but my frustration is still too fresh, and I have not (alas !) been struck by a cobblestone lately.

You will not take it too personally I hope, as you'll notice that my frustration is very specifically aimed to a subset, albeit sizeable, of your fellow citizens.

Please keep up the spirit you show on your article. For good or bad, the US elections are never just an internal matter !

kind regards
manamba

===

http://mapage.noos.fr/manamba/openletter.html

Open letter to 58 million americans

Ladies and gentlemen,
By electing Mr Bush as your White House Spokesman you have pulled quite a feat.

Consider :

you have given this previously unelected leader the legality he had lacked thus far

you have explicitly given your support to the policies of his team

you have ensured that the mechanisms perpetuating terror around the world will remain in place

you have reacted exactly as planned by Mr Laden to his tape

you have mandated your administration to bankrupt your country

you have offered yourselves a see-saw of green, yellow, amber, red alerts, for your unique enjoyment.

While you should seriously feel ashamed and reflect on the state of your country, I know full well that you will bask in a self-congratulary amber-alert feast : enjoy it while it lasts.

To help you keep a sense of perspective about the much-vaunted greatness of the USA, please note that while there are 58.000.000 of you, there are 5.800.000.000 of us.

Goodbye, and be damned.
manamba

----------

To the rest of the world

Now that the circus is over, it may be worthwhile trying to understand how this happened.

Quick brainstorming brings the following possible causes to the forefront :

The daftest electorate on Earth

This actually implies a number of factors :

lack of depth < unwillingness / inability to research any given subject >

actively misinformed by the Administration

sloppily or actively misinformed by the independent media

Decades of TV addiction :

has TV filled the cranial vacuum with analog void, or has it simply fried the grey matter in the cranial cavity ?

This is purely speculative as in any case the results are identical.
Blindness to the monetary aspects of life :

"The Show Must Go On" attitude to current lifestyle, to hell all the rest denial of the state of the country's accounting

In fairness, experience shows that playing to the security fears of any electorate pretty much ensures victory to the "Law and Order" camp (France, April 2002; Italy, May 2001; et al).

But very little was fair in this election : the campaign was spent attacking the opponent rather than tackling the serious problems the USA faces as a country.

That this serious political fault has gone unnoticed for the american electorate tells much about the electorate itself.

The word "accountability" seems to have become an abstract term.

Indeed, terms themselves seem to have been devoided of their intrinsic meaning : are politicians forced to reduce complex issues to catch-phrases because the average voter is unable to grasp the issues, or are the politicos themselves too small for the job ?

To conclude, while in 2000 the american voter could be excused for casting the vote for Mr Bush as he was a little-known candidate, in 2004 the same voter has spent four years watching Mr Bush labouring to construct sentences in plain english on the TV screen. That 58 million people decided this man was fit for the job says a lot more about the voters than about the candidate.

Lessons to be drawn

There are many, but I'll stick to one : the greatest weakness of a democratic system is not the bad-intentioned or incompetent individual politician, it is the generalised ignorance of the electorate, which translates into non-accountability, opening the door to misuse of power in its many shapes and forms.

Regards,
manamba

[RBHam]

1. Will, please write him back

Tell him the election was stolen. Give him Bev Harris' link. www.blackboxvoting.org.

The world must know that the majority of Americans DID vote for Kerry.

Million of new voters don't line up for blocks to KEEP IN a President whose job performance was polled consistently at below 50 percent.

[VelmaD]

2. Not sure whether to laugh or scream

This person actually used "fatidic" in a sentence. *snort*

But would you PLEASE write them back and let them know we did NOT elect Bush. WE WAS ROBBED! And here I thought the European press allegedly did a better job keeping people informed of the facts. *sheesh*

[janx]

3. I just got back from Europe.

And I'm just about as baffled as the writer of that letter is.

[RafterMan]

4. Bleh.

Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I have seen no foreign analysis that provides any real insight into what went wrong or offers any clues about what to try.

Wave your arms, shout Fie! and dig deeper into the left-wing bunker of self-righteous smugness. Oh, the ignorant TV-watchers and their man-god Jeebus!

Well, that's what we've got to work with.

[DemocracyInaction]

5. A UK news headline was: How Can 58 Million People Be So Dumb!!

That about sums it up. Within the next four years the dumb are going to be hurting real bad and they will wake up to find that it's way too late to save them!!!

[writes2000]

6. Did you all see THIS ONE from the Daily Mirror?

GOD HELP AMERICA

Nov 4 2004

THE PEOPLE HAVE SPOKEN..

THEY say that in life you get what you deserve. Well, today America has deservedly got a lawless cowboy to lead them further into carnage and isolation and the unreserved contempt of most of the rest of the world.

This once-great country has pulled up its drawbridge for another four years and stuck a finger up to the billions of us forced to share the same air. And in doing so, it has shown itself to be a fearful, backward-looking and very small nation.

This should have been the day when Americans finally answered their critics by raising their eyes from their own sidewalks and looking outward towards the rest of humanity.

And for a few hours early yesterday, when the exit polls predicted a John Kerry victory, it seemed they had.

But then the horrible, inevitable truth hit home. They had somehow managed to re-elect the most devious, blinkered and reckless leader ever put before them. The Yellow Rogue of Texas.

A self-serving, dim-witted, draft-dodging, gung-ho little rich boy, whose idea of courage is to yell: "I feel good," as he unleashes an awesome fury which slaughters 100,000 innocents for no other reason than greed and vanity.

A dangerous chameleon, his charming exterior provides cover for a power-crazed clique of Doctor Strangeloves whose goal is to increase America's grip on the world's economies and natural resources.

And in foolishly backing him, Americans have given the go-ahead for more unilateral pre-emptive strikes, more world instability and most probably another 9/11.

Why else do you think bin Laden was so happy to scare them to the polls, then made no attempt to scupper the outcome?

There's only one headline in town today, folks: "It Was Osama Wot Won It."

And soon he'll expect pay-back. Well, he can't allow Bush to have his folks whoopin' and a-hollerin' without his own getting a share of the fun, can he?

Heck, guys, I hope you're feeling proud today.

To the tens of millions who voted for John Kerry, my commiserations.

To the overwhelming majority of you who didn't, I simply ask: Have you learnt nothing? Do you despise your own image that much?

Do you care so little about the world beyond your shores? How could you do this to yourselves?

How appalling must one man's record at home and abroad be for you to reject him?

Kerry wasn't the best presidential candidate the Democrats have ever fielded (and he did deserve a kicking for that "reporting for doo-dee" moment), but at least he understood the complexity of the world outside America, and domestic disgraces like the 45 million of his fellow citizens without health cover.

He would have done something to make that country fairer and re-connected it with the wider world.

Instead America chose a man without morals or vision. An economic incompetent who inherited a $2billion surplus from Clinton, gave it in tax cuts to the rich and turned the US into the world's largest debtor nation.

A man who sneers at the rights of other nations. Who has withdrawn from international treaties on the environment and chemical weapons.

A man who flattens sovereign states then hands the rebuilding contracts to his own billionaire party backers.

A man who promotes trade protectionism and backs an Israeli government which continually flouts UN resolutions.

America has chosen a menacingly immature buffoon who likened the pursuit of the 9/11 terrorists to a Wild West, Wanted Dead or Alive man-hunt and, during the Afghanistan war, kept a baseball scorecard in his drawer, notching up hits when news came through of enemy deaths.

A RADICAL Christian fanatic who decided the world was made up of the forces of good and evil, who invented a war on terror, and thus as author of it, believed he had the right to set the rules of engagement.

Which translates to telling his troops to do what the hell they want to the bad guys. As he has at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and countless towns across Iraq.

You have to feel sorry for the millions of Yanks in the big cities like New York, Washington, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco who voted to kick him out.

These are the sophisticated side of the electorate who recognise a gibbon when they see one.

As for the ones who put him in, across the Bible Belt and the South, us outsiders can only feel pity.

Were I a Kerry voter, though, I'd feel deep anger, not only at them returning Bush to power, but for allowing the outside world to lump us all into the same category of moronic muppets.

The self-righteous, gun-totin', military lovin', sister marryin', abortion-hatin', gay-loathin', foreigner-despisin', non-passport ownin' red-necks, who believe God gave America the biggest dick in the world so it could urinate on the rest of us and make their land "free and strong".

You probably won't be surprised to learn of would-be Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn who, on Tuesday, promised to ban abortion and execute any doctors who carried them out.

He also told voters that lesbianism is so rampant in the state's schools that girls were being sent to toilets on their own. Not that any principal could be found to back him up.

These are the people who hijack the word patriot and liken compassion to child-molesting. And they are unknowingly bin Laden's chief recruiting officers.

Al-Qaeda's existence is fuelled by the outpourings of America's Christian right. Bush is its commander-in-chief. And he and bin Laden need each other to survive.

Both need to play Lex Luther to each others' Superman with their own fanatical people. Maybe that's why the mightiest military machine ever assembled has failed to catch the world's most wanted man.

Or is the reason simply that America is incompetent? That behind the bluff they are frightened and clueless, which is why they've stayed with the devil they know.

VISITORS from another planet watching this election would surely not credit the amateurism.

The queues for hours to register a tick; the 17,000 lawyers needed to ensure there was no cheating; the $1.2bn wasted by parties trying to discredit the enemy; the allegations of fraud, intimidation and dirty tricks; the exit polls which were so wildly inaccurate; an Electoral College voting system that makes the Eurovision Song Contest look like a beacon of democracy and efficiency; and the delays and the legal wrangles in announcing the victor.

Yet America would have us believe theirs is the finest democracy in the world. Well, that fine democracy has got the man it deserved. George W Bush.

But is America safer today without Kerry in charge? A man who overnight would have given back to the UN some credibility and authority. Who would have worked out the best way to undo the Iraq mess without fear of losing face.

Instead, the questions facing America today are - how many more thousands of their sons will die as Iraq descends into a new Vietnam? And how many more Vietnams are on the horizon now they have given Bush the mandate to go after Iran, Syria, North Korea or Cuba...?

Today is a sad day for the world, but it's even sadder for the millions of intelligent Americans embarrassed by a gung-ho leader and backed by a banal electorate, half of whom still believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

Yanks had the chance to show the world a better way this week, instead they made a thuggish cowboy ride off into the sunset bathed in glory.

And in doing so it brought Armageddon that little bit closer and re-christened their beloved nation The Home Of The Knave and the Land Of The Freak.

God Help America.

********************************************

I can't create a main post yet but I wish I could. I want everyone to read this.

[Buns_of_Fire]

10. Self-deleted...

I tried to put a link here to the original article. Didn't work.

There are a couple of pieces on the Mirror's home page, though -- this being one of them. They're all pretty sad reading for Americans. Perhaps we'll be forgiven someday -- but it won't be today... :-(

[President Kerry]

14. GHA link doesn't work n/t

[Buns_of_Fire]

19. Sorry. I removed the link... n/t

:spank:

[President Kerry]

12. powerfully articulated... very true

:cry:

[mtnester]

27. As if I did not feel bad enough...

this letter, along with the gay bashing threads (yeah that's MY son you all are talking about handing over to the right)that are infecting this board right now, have made me sick.

My country tis of thee....sweet land of horse poopy

Anyone who would be willing to sponsor my child in a more enlightened country, let me know. My hubby and I will fend for ourselves, but no way are we tossing him to the wolves of this country..24, college graduate..let me know.

Bah humbug

[Hubert Flottz]

7. I expected this backlash!

You can't blame the rest of the world for seeing the truth!

[chimp chump]

8. scolding from foreigners...

...especially from France, isn't going to hurt Bush too much. ;)

Let's keep in mind that America could probably defeat them all combined militarily.

And Britain alone could kick all of Europe's ass. And Israel or Turkey alone could kick the butts of all the Arab countries combined.

Recall Stalin's remarks about Rome's scolding: "How many divisions does the pope have?"

'Nuff said. Folks, some of this is just old-fashioned geopolitics and the spillover of domestic propaganda. They get this stuff the same way we get it from our government.

I think a surprise is coming from Europe. I think we'll see a change in Germany toward closer alliance with the U.S. Their business class is demanding change. And the partnership of New Europe with America right in Germany's backyard and among Germany's new eastern labor pool is a motivating factor.

One more German election and I think we'll see a strong alliance between Britain and Australia and Germany and Israel, all under U.S. leadership in foreign policy.

[WilliamPitt]

9. So might makes right?

[Name removed]

13. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[DemBones DemBones]

18. LOL, Hubert!

Smiling is so good! :7

[chimp chump]

25. .

"So might makes right?"

Of course not. But the bigger battallions nearly always win more battles.

In the end, projecting geopolitical power to achieve national objectives around the world actually does require an effective military.

This has been true throughout history. Some people like to think that if we all just make nice talk at the U.N., it's going to change the nature of all countries and their leaders. Well, maybe someday but not soon. In the meantime, weak countries like to talk and strong countries will determine outcomes.

I think there's a lot of naivete about foreign policy in this country. But there isn't really that much difference between the two major parties over the last fifty years on the fundamental foreign policy objectives.

Look at the current race. Dean vs. Bush really was a clear difference. Far less so in the final match between Kerry vs. Bush. And how did Kerry become the nominee? By appealing to voters that he would be a good commander in chief, using his credentials as a decorated veteran, soothing hunters with his camo, etc.

If you all want to pretend to be holier than thou about being international peaceniks, go right ahead. But every S.o.S for decades has belonged to the CFR and other policy think tanks. These organizations ensure something of a real uniformity in the foreign policy of both parties.

Think about it. When Clinton was bombing in Kosovo Bush and McCain, both likely nominees of their party, refused to offer any criticism whatsoever and publicly supported him. And it was actually very horrible. Clearly an instance where both parties should have opposed saving the Euro-weenies from a problem they created and weren't able to solve themselves. But notice that despite the supposed differences between the two parties on these issues, the two GOP candidates fully supported Clinton, no matter how much their conservative base hated seeing America side with the genocidal Muslim drug smugglers against the Orthodox Serbs. You see the same thing in this year's election. Kerry fully supported Bush's actions and didn't really undercut him in any substantial way.

There is no important foreign policy objective that doesn't have pretty strong bipartisan support. It's been that way for decades.

[Kellanved]

26. quite the contrary

Also the view of Germany drifting to the right is rather outdated. Schröder has gained in the polls for some weeks now, and the Bush election won't work to the SPD's disadvantage.

[exJW]

11. er...no.

America could not defeat even France. Colt and Oppenhiemer make all men equals.

[Squeech]

17. Us and what army?

"Let's keep in mind that America could probably defeat them all combined militarily."

Uh, we don't have any available boots on the ground. They can only keep Iraq barely garrisoned by such expedients as stop-loss orders and shuffling reservists around. One of the dumbest things about the Iraq debacle is that we couldn't prosecute another war now even if our lives literally depended on it.

Oh, we could bomb any small to medium sized country until it was radioactive glass, but would that accomplish any of our strategic goals? Or would it more likely blacken the name "America" forever?

[Spazito]

20. Take a look at the current state of the US dollar on the exchange...

markets today. A battle can be won in ways other than militarily and the world is speaking today, imo. The US military cannot win an economic war and that is the war that is being waged now.

[donsu]

22. you are right - the world needs to withdraw business/money from US

make Rove scream

[Jasper 91]

24. Your every utterance , tells me you are on the wrong site .

[VLC98]

28. "Britain alone could kick all of Europe's ass"

Did you just arrive in a time machine from the 1870's?

[DinahMoeHum]

15. Will, you better tell these folks that the people who voted for Bush

don't give a shit what a foreigner thinks of them. In fact they're PROUD of their ignorance and arrogance.

Check out this link:
http://www.progressive.org/webex04/wx1103c04.html

Matthew Rothschild:
"A Letter to Incredulous Friends Around the World"
November 3, 2004

(snip)
...some brutal honesty: A large chunk of the public here doesn't give a damn about what anyone else around the world thinks about the United States. In fact, for many people here, it is a point of pride to ignore the wishes of the rest of the world. Bush played on this nativism by saying, "We don't need a permission slip from anyone" before defending the United States. In the post-9/11 era, this pitch was an especially effective one.

Deep in the psyche of the American mind is the myth of exceptionalism: that we, somehow, are the greatest country on Earth, a shining beacon on a hill, placed here by God himself. This is the American superiority complex, a profound affliction that distorts our perceptions and enables manipulative Presidents to give the marching orders..."

(snip)


:evilfrown:

[glitch]

16. Well, either 58 million Americans were stupid enough to vote for *

Or a hell of a lot more Americans are stupid enough to let the election be stolen.

Again.

Either way, we deserve the disdain of the world community, and I imagine we're gonna get it.

[DemBones DemBones]

21. Stupid enough to let the election be stolen? POWERLESS enough to

be able to do nothing.

[anarchy1999]

23. All I can say is oh no. We are in deep trouble. So sorry for the rest

that can't see it.