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BGonline.org Forums
big brother is alive an well in europe
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: big brother is alive an well in europe (Achim)
Date: Saturday, 25 August 2007, at 9:53 p.m.
"ec" must be a reference to the European Union, which is -- obviously to some -- simply a front for nefarious "one-worlders" and other members of a vast conspiracy to undermine the hegemony of God's Own Country and the hallowed rights of Americans as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and in no other place by fomenting the eventual creation of a socialist communist secularist darwinist totalitarian global government. Variations on this argument are used in the USA, apparently with all seriousness, to oppose, domestically, such things as national identity cards and universal health care and, internationally, U.S. participation in multilateral conventions on a variety of subjects including human rights, land mines, torture, the use of ocean bottom resources, environmental accords, and international courts of justice.
Ironically, some of the same people who fervently oppose, for example, a national identify card, which is the norm in the nations of "Big Brother" Europe, on the grounds of its enormous threat to individual liberties, see nothing wrong with a largely unsupervised National Security Agency warrantlessly monitoring the telephone calls, emails, internet access and library visits of hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans and other nationals, all of which is justified, they say, by the so-called and apparently never-ending "war on terror."
Americans, on a personal level, are not undeserved of a reputation for generosity and the "kindness and hospitality" Achim speaks of having experienced in his travels in this country, but our politics, polity and policies are marred by an ugly undercurrent of messianic and xenophobic egotism that would have us believe that Americans have nothing to learn from our fellow European democrats and, indeed, little to learn from each other. Thus can the Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (who finished fourth in the recent Iowa straw poll) proclaim to resounding applause that "we" -- that is, America alone -- "are the last best hope of Western civilization," and, to appreciative laughter, that the so-called war on terror is "a war we must finish and it's tough when your enemies are psychopaths and your allies are the French." Hardy-har-har.
PS. Did you read Al Gore's latest book?
No, I haven't yet. Could the man who got the most votes for President in the year 2000 possibly have anything worthwhile to say?
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