Diplomacy – Page 15 – Public Intelligence Blog

2004/01/142009/12/04

Review: Human Security and the New Diplomacy–Protecting People, Promoting Peace

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Civil Society, Complexity & Catastrophe, Diplomacy, Disaster Relief, Environment (Problems), Humanitarian Assistance, Stabilization & Reconstruction

Evolution of Man Demands Attention to Global Human Security,

January 14, 2004

Robert Grant McRae

In the mid-1990's the United Nations (learn to respect them, they stink at the details but work at the strategic level) declared human security to be a just cause for intervention. Since then a number of extremely thoughtful works have documented the links between failed states (where human security is non-existent) and direct threats to the homelands of the advanced Western states. See my various lists, especially the list on Stategy & Force Structure.This book, by an extraordinary duo including the man who may well be Canada's foremost authority in this arena, provides the first and as best I can tell only comprehensive discussion of why human security in every clime and place matters locally, that is, to the future of your children.

It places special emphasis on the importance of multi-cultural (i.e. not bully boy unilateral “we are the light and might makes right) approaches and large investments (commensurate with what we waste now on B2 bombers and nuclear carriers) in peacekeeping and stabilization operations which provide a vastly greater return on investment than funds wasted lining the pockets of military-industrial complex managers.

2003/11/302009/12/04

Review: Breaking the Real Axis of Evil–How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025

6 Star Top 10%, America (Anti-America), Congress (Failure, Reform), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Single Most Important Work of the Century for American Moral Diplomacy,

November 30, 2003

Mark Palmer

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links and new comment,

New Comment: In my view, this is the single most important work of the century with respect to American moral diplomacy. I note with concern that under Bush-Cheney “Failed States” have increased from 75 in 2005 to 177 in 2007. We've lost our mind, and our morals, as a Nation.

Ambassador Mark Palmer puts to rest all those generally unfair stereotypes of Foreign Service Officers as “cookie pushing” softies who fall in love with their host countries and blame America for any flaws in the bi-lateral relationship. With this book he provides an inspiring model for precisely what every Foreign Service Officer should aspire: to understand, to articulate, and then to implement very great goals that serve democracy and help extend the bounty of the American way of life–moral capitalism and shared wealth–to every corner of the world.

This is a detailed and practical book, not just visionary. It is useful and inspiring, not just a personal view. It is also a damning indictment of fifty years of US White House and Congressional politics, where in the name of anti-communism and cheap oil America–regardless of which party has been in power, has been willing to consort with the most despotic, ruthless, murderous regimes in the history of mankind. Still alive today and still very much “friends” of the U.S. Government are dictators that think nothing of murdering millions.

There has been some improvement, offset by an increase in partly free countries. From 69 countries not free at all in 1972 we now have 47. From 38 countries partly free in 1972 we now have 56, many of those remnants of the former Soviet Union. Free countries have nearly doubled from 43 to 89, but free and poor is quite a different thing from free and prosperous.

The level of detail and also of brevity in this book is quite satisfying. On the one hand, Ambassador Palmer provides ample and well-documented discussion of the state of the world, on the other he does not belabor the matter–his one to two-paragraph summative descriptions of each of the dictatorships is just enough, just right.

He distinguishes between Personalistic Dictatorships (20, now less Hussein in Iraq); Monarch Dictators (7, with Saudi Arabia being the first in class); Military Dictators (5, with US allies Sudan and Pakistan and 1 and 2 respectively); Communist Dictators (5); Dominant-Party Dictators (7); and lastly, Theocratic Dictators (1, Iran).

Ambassador Palmer makes several important points with this book, and I summarize them here: 1) conventional wisdom of the past has been flawed–we should not have sacrificed our ideals for convenience; 2) dictatorships produce inordinate amounts of collateral damage that threatens the West, from genocide and mass migrations to disease, famine, and crime; 3) there is a business case to be made for ending U.S. support for dictatorships, in that business can profit more from stable democratic regimes over the long-term; and lastly, 4) that the U.S. should sanction dictators, not their peoples, and we can begin by denying them and all their cronies visas for shopping expeditions in the US.

The book has an action agenda that is worthy, but much more important is the clear and present policy that Ambassador Palmer advocates, one that is consistent with American ideals as well as universal recognition of human rights. Ambassador Palmer's work, on the one hand, shows how hypocritical and unethical past Administrations have been–both Democratic and Republican–and on the other, he provides a clear basis for getting us back on track.

I agree with his proposition that we should have a new Undersecretary for Democracy, with two Assistant Secretaries, one responsible for voluntary democratic transitions, the other for dealing with recalcitrant dictators. Such an expansion of the Department of State would work well with a similar change in the Pentagon, with a new Undersecretary for Peacekeeping Operations and Complex Emergencies, my own idea.

This is a very fine book, and if it helps future Foreign Service Officers to understand that diplomacy is not just about “getting along” but about making very significant changes in the world at large, then Ambassador Palmer's work will be of lasting value to us all.

Forthcoming on Amazon in February and also free at OSS.Net/CIB:
COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, edited by Mark Tovey with a Foreword by Yochai Benkler and an Afterword by the Rt. Hon. Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada. I have high hopes for all of us finally getting it right (Winston Churchill: “The Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first.”) Now is our time to get it right. We can start by electing Senator Barack Obama as our forward-thinking always listening open-minded President.

2003/10/282009/12/04

Review: The Health of Nations–Society and Law beyond the State

6 Star Top 10%, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History, Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Public Administration, Secession & Nullification, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

One of a Handful of Revolutionary Books,

October 28, 2003

Philip Allott

Edit of21 Dec 07 to add links and reassert importance of this work.

Of the 1000+ books I have reviewed on Amazon, this is one of a handful that can be considered truly revolutionary. Three others that come instantly to mind are those by Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, William Greider, The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life.

This book is not an easy read. The author, a Professor of Law in the University of Cambridge, wrote an earlier work, Eunomia: New Order for a New World, that has remained similar obscure, and that is a pity, for what I see here is a truly brilliant mind able to suggest that the Congress of Vienna, the current law of nations, and the de-humanization of state to state relations, isolating the internal affairs and inhumanities of state from global public morality and indignation, are the greatest travesty in human history.

The author joins William Greider in suggesting that the state as a corporate personality is as immoral (and irrational in terms of natural law) as is the corporate personality that allows corporations to treat humans as “goods.” In this book the author sets out to do nothing less than logically overturn centuries of absolutist amoral power institutionalized by elites in the form of state governments with sovereign rights divorced from and with eminent domain over their subjects (vice citizens), and to propose a new form of globalized human society that restores the human aspect to relations among peoples and among nations of peoples.

This is a book that requires patience. It must be slowly and methodically absorbed. The footnotes are quite extraordinary, as is the summative and explicatory survey of many different literatures over many different historical periods.

The author is critical of universities for failing to develop the public mind, and offers a lovely exposition of how sanity, insanity, and public consciousness are all subject to the mythology of capitalism and the manipulation of the elites–in this he would find fellow travelers (smile) in Chomsky and Vidal. He concludes that diplomacy (and statecraft) as an articulation of the public mind and public interest have *failed*, and looks instead to some sort of social re-ordering from the bottom up.

This book, apart from offering an enlightened vision of the law as a living thing able to encapsulate changes morality and changing interests among parties, does nothing less than reconceptualize international relations. This author is to the law of nations what Vaclav Havel was to communism.

He touches on a point Henry Kissinger makes in the last of his books I reviewed (Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century), and specifically that “The risk now facing humanity is the globalizing of the all-powerful, all-consuming social systems, without the moral, legal, political and cultural aspirations and constraints, such as they are, which moderate social action at the national level.” The world, in essence, has become much too complex and much too volatile and much too dangerous for archaic state-level forms of mandarin governance.

In the middle of the book, the author's review of how Germany previously collapsed into a patchwork of insignificant nations sounds all too much like the United States of America, where citizenship is losing its value, tyrannical minorities are in isolation from one another (and from reality), and the sense of national identity is too easily captured by a handful of neo-conservatives (modern Nazis). Interestingly, as with Havel, he notes the importance of art and culture as a means of synthesizing national identity, and would probably agree with E.O. Wilson (“Consilience”) as to the humanities being vital to the context and conduct of the sciences. His list of national “diseases” is both disturbing and timely.

He joins Jefferson and the founding fathers in focusing on the health and happiness of the people as the ultimate organizing principle (some would translate “happiness” as “fulfillment”, a more accomplished and less frivolous objective).

On page 137 he is quite clear in suggesting that capitalism as it is practiced today, is nothing less than a form of totalitarianism, and he goes on to say on page 139 that social evil is the greatest challenge facing humanity today. Instead of socializing individuals into the reduced status of “goods” we should be socializing the state into a representative and general democracy by rehumanizing humanity and rehumanizing the organizations that are supposed to provide collective voice to the people.

In following pages the author provides a brilliant catalog of the ills of democracy, reconceptualizes democracy as being based on the rule of law (for all) rather than on who rules (for the benefit of the few), and he explicitly condemns the largely unaccountable forms of concentrated power (by which we take to mean the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and other devices for perpetuating immoral capitalism irrespective of local needs).

The full force of the author's thinking comes into full stride in the concluding portions of the book as he integrates new concepts of international law, history, social relations, and new forms of intergovernmental relations truly representative of the species as a whole and the people as a moral force. He laments the manner in which an extraordinarily global elite has been able to “separate” people from morality and from one another, leading to a common acceptance of five intolerable things: 1) unequal social development; 2) war and armaments; 3) governmental oppression; 4) physical degradation; and 5) spiritual degradation.

The author concludes by proposing a new view of the human world, and his remarks must be read in the original. He ends, as do Will and Ariel Durant in their summative “The Lessons of History,” by noting that the necessary revolution is that which must take place in our minds, not on the streets.”

This is an utterly brilliant book that has been badly marketed and is grossly under-appreciated, even by the so-called intelligencia. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to cast off their slave clothes, stop being a drone, and live free.

More recent books that fully validate this superb work, with reviews:
Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

2003/10/102009/12/04

Review: Madam Secretary–A Memoir

3 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Diplomacy

Good, Not Great, Travelogue, not Strategic Dialog,

October 10, 2003

Madeleine Albright

This is a diplomatic companion to Hillary Clinton's lightweight personal story. Madame Secretary will never be confused with Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski. It merits comment that Hillary appears to have had a great deal to do with Albright getting the job. If you want a read that covers the years superficially, and glosses over a great deal of what actually did or did not transpire, this is the book for you. If you want serious reading about international relations, or grand strategy, or how to deal with the twenty big problems facing the world, see the other books I have reviewed for Amazon, including Joe Nye, Kissinger, Boren et al, Jonathan Schell, Shultz et al, E.O. Wilson, J. F. Rischard, and so on. Half the book is about the personal path to power, the other half is about very narrow slices of what the Clinton Administration chose to focus on–an administration where foreign policy and national security were largely on automatic pilot and very much in a back seat compared to domestic matters.Most troubling to me is the chapter on terrorism, chapter 22, titled “A Special Kind of Evil.” In exactly 17 pages (.03 of 512 text pages), Albright manages to gloss over the fact that she deliberately and repeatedly sided with Sandy Burger in constantly suppressing intelligence that warned suicidal terrorism was on the rise, and took a back seat–or no seat–on the subject of devising a national grand strategy for counter-terrorism. She is proudest of getting $1 billion for turning our Embassies into bunkers, something 9-11 demonstrated to be inconsequential.

She says “The response by the Clinton administration to the Africa embassy bombings and other attacks on our watch resulted in the apprehension of many terrorist suspects and established a strong precedent for international cooperation in fighting terror.” This is absolute and utter baloney. The reality is that neither the CIA nor the FBI or any foreign governments were actually put on a war footing, because the Clinton's did not want to dim the lights and bear down.

I find it quite noteworthy that “intelligence” does not appear in the index as a term. This is a book about travel and personal meetings, which is how Clinton's national security team spent its time. We have gone from that extreme to the other, of neo-conservatives who never served in uniform throwing military force around unilaterally and indiscriminately.

The next president must find a middle ground, an informed middle ground where intelligence, strategy, policy and spending (“it's not policy until it's in the budget”) are fully integrated, and America is able to devise a sustainable, strong, smart foreign policy that includes a robust homeland defense with homeland counterintelligence, a massive peace force, a considerable global constabulary force, and a big war force sufficient for two major regional conflicts at once. We cannot cut the national security budget by one penny, but by golly, we can do a *lot” better than either the passive Clintonians or the psychopathic Bushies.

2003/07/292009/12/04

Review: Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Compelling Condemnation of Crude Corruption,

July 29, 2003

Robert Baer

Edit of 22 Dec to add links. Book is available in paperback.

Former spy Robert Baer, author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, makes the leap from intelligence reformist to national mentor with his new book, “SLEEPING WITH THE DEVIL: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.” Indeed, his last sentence has the White House laying in the moonlight with its legs spread, lustfully eyeing the Saudi wallet on the bureau.

This is an extraordinary compelling work, not least because it provides detailed and documented discovery not previously available, of how the U.S. government has over the course of several administrations made a deliberate decision to a) not spy on the Arab countries, b) not collect and read open sources in Arabic, c) not attempt to understand the sub-state actors such as the Muslim brotherhood, despite a long history in which these groups commit suicide to achieve their objectives, including the murder of several heads of state.

Baer's most brutal points should make every American shudder: it is America itself that is subsidizing terrorism, as well as the corruption of the Saudi royal family. Baer's documented estimate is that $1 dollar from every barrel of petroleum is spent on Saudi royal family sexual misbehavior, and $1.50 of every barrel of petroleum bought by America ultimately ends up funding extremist schools, foundations, and terrorist groups.

Baer has “gone back in time” to document how all of this terrorism began in the 1970's, but despite its terrible local consequences (including the assassination of heads of state), was ignored by Washington as “a local problem.”

In one lovely real-life account, Baer, then duty officer at CIA while Iraq poised to invade Kuwait, found that the $35 billion per year system was useless, impotent. It came down to his calling the chief of station in Kuwait, who called a border guard, who lifted his binoculars and described the Iraqi tanks stopped for lunch. Baer says: “As I waited, I wondered: Is this what all that money for intelligence is buying us? A pair of binoculars?”

Baer joins with Robert Kaplan in concluding that democracy in Arabia would be an out and out disaster. The decades of Islamic extremism and anti-Americanism run amok cannot be resolved by democratic elections because the very people who most hate America will be elected. Baer observes that “strongman tactics” such as used by Saddam Hussein and by the Syrian leadership–including a “scorched earth” campaign against the internal terrorist groups–are a more stable “rule of law”. One can conclude that the US has made a mistake in destabilizing Iraq, and that the imposition of a democratic solution in Iraq will turn out to be vastly more difficult, and vastly more expensive, than the naive neo-conservatives understood when they set forth without bothering to establish who was in the majority within the population being “liberated.”

Saudi Arabia has bought and paid for all the White House and Congressional influence it needs. This is why the recently released 9-11 report contains no mention of the secret documentation of Saudi Arabian complicity in the terrorism that took 3,000 American lives. As Senator Shelby noted on PBS NewsHour recently (he has read the secret report), 93% of the blanked out pages, and specifically those on Saudi sponsorship of terrorism against America and other nations, is a “con man's” effort to avoid “embarrassment.” As the families of the 9-11 victims have said, “we need to know.”

Baer is extraordinary. He was a success as a case officer (a clandestine representive of America dealing with traitors and terrorists under conditions of extreme risk), and he has now become a sort of “Patrick Henry” of the modern era, warning us in clear and compelling terms that White House corruption (a non-partisan recurring corruption) and Saudi Arabia are the twin swords upon which this great Nation may yet impale itself.

Other books Americans need to read (or at least read the reviews):
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism: How the Financial System Underminded Social Ideals, Damaged Trust in the Markets, Robbed Investors of Trillions – and What to Do About It
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition

2003/07/122009/12/04

Review: Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Diplomacy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Essential Reference for Understanding Bad as Well as Unethical Decisions,

July 12, 2003

Morton H. Halperin

Edit of 22 Dec 07 to stress importance of this book today, and add links. This books says that one of the rules of the game is to lie to the President if you think you can get away with it. Dick Cheney has created three new rules:

1. Ignore the President, Hijack the Presidency

2. Subvert Congress and Article 1 of the Constitution

3. Lie to the People, Over and Over, Even After the Lie is Known to be a Lie

This book is quite extraordinary. It is one of perhaps ten that I consider to be lifetime essential references for any national security official–not because I condone the rules for subverting and manipulating policy that the book documents, but in order to defend against them, for in the aggregate, they all undermine both the Constitution and the power of Congress.

Part I is an introduction to national security interests, the organizations within the government that each take on a life of their own and interpret both what our foreign policy should be and how it should be pursued in their own terms, how Presidential interests–predominantly defined by domestic constituencies–compete with the bureaucracy, and how the various players from career officials to political appointees to others play against one another.

Part II, the heart of the book, dissects the many strategies for manipulating decisions within the bureacracy. The “rules of the game” include the manipulation of which agency gets the lead (tending to suppress all dissenting opinions from other agencies) to which staffer in the White House has the lead (pre-determining the outcome), to means of using foreign officials, the press, and business leaders to present supporting opinions, to manipulating the President. [Although not cited in this book, having occurred many years later, John Lehman's ability to get President Reagan to pick three names for three aircraft carriers, was sufficient to blow away the Secretary of Defense view that only two were needed…as related in his Command of the Seas.]

Part III is, if you will, the guerrilla campaign that follows a decision. As George Shultz, then Secretary of State, is on record in Congressional testimony as saying–we paraphrase from recollection: “nothing in this town is ever decided–every decision has to be refought every single day.” The author concludes his extraordinary book with the rules of the game for distorting, undermining, or extending decisions through implementation decisions and actions in the field far from Washington. We are reminded of Harry Truman's reflections on CIA, after he retired, to the effect that he had never intended for CIA to become an action arm or anything other than a central analysis organization.

I cannot recommend a more useful nor more important book to those who would seek to understand how a handful of neo-conservatives, led by Dick Cheney, were able to manipulate the President, Congress, the Armed Forces (including the silent Joint Chiefs of Staff) and the American public, into an unjust war with Iraq. Cheney knows the “rules of the game” better than anyone else including the President….this book reveals his methods of operation in a concise and easy to understand manner.

Other books that build on this one:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Books that go in the right direction:
A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All

2003/05/262009/12/04

Review: Why Do People Hate America?

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Ben Franklin & James Madison Would Have Praised This Book,

May 26, 2003

Ziauddin Sardar

The heart of this book is not why people hate America, but rather on how Americans have lost touch with reality.This book joins three others books I have reviewed and recommend separately, as the “quartet for revolution” in how Americans must demand access to reliable information about the real world. They are Bill McKibben on “The Age of Missing Information” (a day in the woods contrasted with a year reviewing a day's worth of non-information on broadcast television); Anne Branscomb's “Who Owns Information” (not the citizen); and Roger Shattuck, “Forbidden Knowledge.” These are the higher level books–there are many others, both on the disgrace of the media and the abuse of secrecy by government, as well as on such excellent topics as “Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of American Democracy” by William Greider, and “The Closing of the American Mind” by Allan Bloom.

Here are a few points made by this book that every American needs to understand if we are to restore true democracy, true freedom of the press, and true American values to our foreign policy, which has been hijacked by neo-conservative corporate interests:

1) “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Dr. Samuel Johnson said this in 1775, on the eve of US revolution from British tyranny. When patriotism is used to suppress dissent, to demand blind obedience, and to commit war crimes “in our name,” then patriotism has lost its meaning.

2) According to the authors, Robert Kaplan and Thomas Friedman are flat out *wrong* when they suggest that “they” hate us for our freedoms, the success of our economy, for our rich cultural heritage. Most good-hearted Americans simply have no idea how big the gap is between our perception of our goodness and the rest of the world's perception of our badness (in terms set forth below).

3) According to the authors, a language dies every two weeks. Although there are differing figures on how many languages are still active today (between 3,000 and 5,500), the point is vital. If language is the ultimate representation of a distinct and unique culture that is ideally suited to the environment in which it has flourished over the past millenium, then the triple strikes of English displacing the language, the American “hamburger virus” and city planning displacing all else, and American policy instruments–inclusive of the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund–eliminating any choices before the Third World or even the European policy makers, then America can be said to have been invasive, predatory, and repressive. At multiple levels, from “hate” by Islamic fundamentalists, to “fear and disdain” by French purists, to “annoyance” by Asians to “infatuation” by teenagers, the Americans are seen as way too big for their britches–Americans are the proverbial bull in the china shop, and their leaders lack morals–the failure of America to ratify treaties that honor the right of children to food and health, the failure of America to respect international conventions-the average of two military interventions a year since the Cold War (not to mention two countries invaded but not rescued), all add up to “blowback.”

4) According to the authors, America is “out of control” largely because the people who vote and pay taxes are uninformed. The authors of this book are most articulate. Consider the following quote: “And the power of the American media, as we repeatedly argue, works to keep American people closed to experience and ideas from the rest of the world and thereby increases the insularity, self-absorption, and ignorance that is the overriding problem the rest of the world has with American.”

5) According to the authors, the impact of America overseas can be best summed up as a “hamburger virus” that comes as a complete package, and is especially pathological. McDonalds “serves” rather than “feeds”. The “hamburger culture” is eradicating indigenous cultures everywhere, and often this is leading, decades later, to the realization that those cultures had thrived because they were well suited to the environment–the “hamburger culture” assumes that electricity will provide for air conditioning, that everyone can afford a car once the cities have been paved over, etcetera. When this turns out to not be the case, the losses that have occurred over decades cannot be turned back, and poverty, as well as ethnic strife, are the result.

6) Finally–and the authors have many other points to make in this excellent book, but this is the last one for this “summative” evaluation of their work–according to the authors the USA is what could be considered the ultimate manifestation of the “eighth crusade”, with Christopher Columbus and the destruction of the native American Indians (both North and South) having been the seventh crusade. The authors are most interesting as they define the predominantly Catholic edicts from the Pope and from Kings and Queens, that declared that anyone not speaking their language (and therefore not able to understand their edicts) was a savage, an animal, and therefore suitable for enslavement. In the eyes of much of the world, America is a culturally-oppressive force that is enslaving local governments and local economies for the benefit of a select wealthy elite that live in gated compounds, while demeaning, demoting, and destroying the balance of power and the balance with nature and the balance among tribes, that existed prior to the arrival of American “gunboat diplomacy” and “banana capitalism.”

There you have it. According to the authors:
1) Americans are uninformed about the real world
2) Americans are not in charge of their own foreign policy
3) What is done in the name of all Americans is severely detrimental to the rest of the world, and Americans will pay a heavy price if they allow this “hamburger/gunboat imperialism” to continue.

May God have mercy on our souls, for we know not what we do.