Saturday, August 23, 2014
RE DK 'S CURRENT POST AND MY COMMENT
Sunday, September 29, 2013 SEE DK'S CURRENT POST COMMENT Re Europe and the US, the erroneous place for the original comment, why not, nevertheless, quote a few words roughly pertinent to the discussion there: Sir Michael Howard, Lessons Of History, "1945--End of an Era?":
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....."
"...The United States and the Soviet Union are both inheritors of the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment against which European, and especially German nationalism was very largely a reaction." DK
Here, I think he misses the mark, in that nationalist, no less that multi-ethnic universalist, states, grew out of principally enlightenment ideas. Recent remarks by the President about American exceptionalism highlight, it seems to me, the kindred Enlightenment origins of nationalist, and multi-ethnic universalist, states, under the skin.
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....."
"...The United States and the Soviet Union are both inheritors of the universalist ideas of the Enlightenment against which European, and especially German nationalism was very largely a reaction." DK
Here, I think he misses the mark, in that nationalist, no less that multi-ethnic universalist, states, grew out of principally enlightenment ideas. Recent remarks by the President about American exceptionalism highlight, it seems to me, the kindred Enlightenment origins of nationalist, and multi-ethnic universalist, states, under the skin.
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