The DOTIGOTUS (or: You can't get there from here)

[Fumesucker]

http://www.distantocean.com/2007/08/the-dotigotus-o.html

Michael Cohen (a former speechwriter for the US ambassador to the UN) illustrates why so many Americans are incapable of understanding US foreign policy:

I believe that America is inherently good. That goodness, if you will, comes from the basic values that I believe underpin this nation, from not only our founding documents and in particular the Bill of Rights, but from the ongoing efforts to ensure the spread of freedom and opporunity to all our citizens. If you think this sounds hackneyed that is your right - you have as much right to hate America as I do to love it, but I apologize to no one for my patriotism and basic faith in America and its people.

The belief that America is inherently good is what makes so many people impervious to mountains of evidence that the United States is, in fact, exactly like every other powerful nation throughout history: driven first and foremost by its interests (namely the interests of those who govern it and the groups they represent); bent on extending its control and influence; and concerned with human rights and international law mainly to the extent that they can be used to rationalize and provide cover for those actual underlying motivations.

When this Doctrine of the Inherent Goodness of the United States is fixed firmly in someone's mind, they literally can't get there from here. They've foreclosed the possibility of arriving at one entire set of conclusions before the questions are even considered. It's like asserting categorically that nothing heavier than air can fly under its own power, and then trying to explain how a jumbo jet gets from London to Rome; it's literally impossible to arrive at the correct explanation.

Adherents of the DOTIGOTUS are constantly faced with cognitive dissonance, which can only be resolved through increasingly tortured rationalizations and outright rejection of reality. The overthrow of Iranian democracy and support for the Shah of Iran (along with a host of other tyrants), the killing of millions of Vietnamese, the sponsorship of and bipartisan support for the genocidal Indonesian invasion of East Timor, the instigation of mass slaughter in Central America throughout the 1980s, the refusal even to call what was happening in Rwanda in 1994 "genocide" and the shameful lies that were offered for the failure to act--these are just a few of the endless examples in which reality and the DOTIGOTUS conflict. In each of these cases (and in the dozens I didn't mention) you'll find true believers doing everything in their power to avoid the simple, obvious conclusion that the US acts without any regard for human rights or international law.

<snip>

Finish reading the piece at the link.

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[hobbit709]

2. k&r

[blindpig]

3. Amerian Exeptionalism is a lie...

one that is pounded into us from an early age and is constantly reinforced throughout life. It is the only way such an enormous lie can be maintained.