I never took much interest in Bob Ellis until I read his article America, America ... :
"The twelve-year war in Afghanistan and the ten-year bugging of Merkel make us ask the question of what the fuck the Americans think they are doing.
Are they defending democracy in a Muslim land? No, they are propping up drug lords, and arming fanatics. Will women be freer and more fulfilled when they leave there? No, and some will be killed for their presumptuous new literacy and published essays. Are women better off in Iraq than they were? No, Saddam gave them university educations, and Christians religious freedom, and the present pious mobsters do not, and every marketplace is a war zone, and twenty million Iraqis are sorry America came. What the fuck do they think they are doing? And by what right do they tell other countries how to live?
It is not as though their country is a good example. It has, per capita, more encarcerated prisoners than any other nation. It kills, by gunfire, twenty-eight thousand of its citizens every year. It sold warplanes and cluster-bombs to Assad. It mutated with Agent Orange ten million foetuses who had done no wrong. It denied health care to thirty million Americans, including Obama’s mother, who needed it, and died for want of it.
By what right then does it kill with drones other people of different opinions? It is hard to see how that right is automatic. Fifty thousand children killed at Nagasaki and Hiroshima did not confer it. Twenty thousand children dying a day of global capitalism do not affirm it.
It is time America got out of other countries’ affairs. It’s time they stopped listening to their leaders’ phone calls. They look madder and madder every day. Since Clinton left office, they have been bombing to shit other countries they have no business in, and losing wars right and left. Trillions that could have been spent cleaning up their own act, paying good schoolteachers to do good work in the inner cities, giving Blacks good reasons not to shoot each other, were spent blowing up instead sleeping children in Kandahar, and cows in Uruzguan, and it was money evilly spent.
Until Americans get into their thick skulls that death is a serious penalty for wayward thought there will be no good done by their agents anywhere. Bombs and bullets make no-one change the way they think. The Blitz did not convert Londoners to Nazism. Pearl Harbour did not convert Americans to Shinto. Flat-screen televisions showing CNN and BBC might change a few young minds. But why bother? Why bother? Iran and Afghanistan were adequate emerging social democracies before Americans stuck their bib in, and so was Chile. They should get the fuck out of everywhere.
I watch each night of late Jed Bartlet deciding what to do with other countries’ internal affairs. And I wonder why he bothers. Denmark doesn’t do this. Sweden doesn’t do this. Austria doesn’t do this. New Zealand doesn’t do this. Bhutan doesn’t do this. Why does he? Is his advisors’ expertise better than, say, Hans Blix’s or Kim Beazley’s or Bob Carr’s? Why do they presume to know how to sort things in other countries, when twenty-eight thousand of their own people die of gunfire every year, and half a million are traumatised by it, every year? And thousands of black men await for decades their lethal injection?
Why don’t they clean up their own house first, with money they’re wasting on the trashing of others’?
Just asking."
I don't agree with everything Bob Ellis has ever written or said but America, America ... hits the nail on the head.
