Bernie Sanders Is Confronting America’s Foreign Policy Amnesia Head-On
▻http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-is-confronting-americas-foreign-policy-amnesia-head-on
Beyond institutional amnesia, a rejection of causal analysis is the existential rock on which American Exceptionalism sits. The United States’ unique sense of itself depends on an ambiguous relationship to the past. History is affirmed, since it is America’s unprecedented historical success that justifies the exceptionalism. Yet history is denied, or at least what is denied is an understanding of the past as a series of causal relationships. This is what allows the fiction that “we live only for ourselves,” and manifests itself, in its most virulent form, in the kind of know-nothing resentfulness that today dominates the American Right and Republican Party. The denial of history is also what allows for our habitual interventionism. The blowback from any given action (arming anti-Soviet jihadists in Afghanistan, for example) is rinsed clean of its source and given a new origin story, blamed on generalized chaos that exists beyond our borders, a laundering that in turn allows future interventionism.
#Etats-Unis #déni #délire