[R-P] EEUU: ¿Porqué matan los progresistas?

[Néstor Gorojovsky]

Sí, sí. "Porqué matan los progresistas", y no "porqué matan A los
progresistas" en EEUU.

La nota que sigue (en inglés) demuestra que los presidentes
"progresistas" de EEUU han sido siempre más crueles, brutales y
devastadores en la escena mundial que sus pares republicanos. Que
cuando Obama reivindicaba a Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson,
Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, y John F. Kennedy en su campaña
electoral no estaba propiciando la paz mundial, sino una
intensificación de las acciones bélicas proestadounidenses.

Y además intenta rastrear el origen ideológico de esta aparente
paradoja, no sin bastante éxito, en ese providencialismo salvacional,
de directo origen religioso, que nutre al pensamiento estadounidense,
tanto conservador como progresista: "Aunque se suele castigar a los
progresistas por su 'relativismo secular', como dice Bill O´Reilly, lo
que impulsaba a los estadistas de EEUU que libraron las guerras más
grandes fue la doctrina cristiana de las 'buenas obras', que Obama
enunció varias veces en sus discursos con la figura de nuestro deber
de 'ser el guardián de nuestro hermano'."

Una forma algo peculiar de esa protección es, por ejemplo, la doctrina
del "destino manifiesto". El liderazgo de EEUU en el "Hemisferio
Occidental", según esa doctrina, no expresa la voluntad de poder,
dominación, saqueo y lucro de la burguesía yanqui sino la buena
intención de propagar en nuestras tierras las sanísimas instituciones
del Gran Hermano, etc... Y no es cuestión de descartar esta tontería
así nomás, ya que en ella se concentra buena parte del "pensamiento"
de los sectores de nuestras propias sociedades que se admiran con los
EEUU.

Los motivos materiales de este celo misional, de todos modos, son
bastante simples: como los "progresistas" tienen que satisfacer más
demandas sociales y populares que los conservadores, de algún lado
tienen que obtener los recursos. Eso es todo lo que queda cuando uno
limpia de oropel religioso las fuerzas actuantes. Pero con la crítica
positiva del misticismo no se avanza gran cosa. A una religiosidad
secular tan potente solo se la puede combatir librando batalla al
nivel de la totalidad del pensamiento.


---------- Forwarded message ----------

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-17/why-liberals-kill/full/

Why Liberals Kill
by Thaddeus Russell
October 17, 2009 | 6:22pm

The left may be pressuring President Obama to exit Afghanistan. But
their heroes—from FDR to JFK—promoted U.S. involvement in more wars
than all modern GOP presidents combined.

Should President Barack Obama continue his escalation of the wars in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, it will be the liberal thing to do.

What too few Americans realize—especially the president’s anti-war
supporters, who accuse him of betraying liberal or "progressive"
values—is that if he accedes to General Stanley McChrystal's request for
more troops in Afghanistan and intensifies the drone attacks in
Pakistan, he will follow squarely in the footsteps of the great liberal
statesmen he has cited as his role models. Though opponents of the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan cheered loudly when Obama spoke reverentially in
his campaign speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin
Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy, those heroes of the
president promoted and oversaw U.S. involvement in wars that killed, by
great magnitudes, more Americans and foreign civilians than all the
modern Republican military operations combined.

Though liberals are routinely chastised for their “secular relativism,”
as Bill O’Reilly puts it, American statesmen who waged the largest wars
were driven by the Christian doctrine of “good works,” often enunciated
in Obama’s speeches as the duty to be “our brother’s keeper.”

What should be even more troubling to those who call themselves
progressives but oppose the current wars: Obama's motivations for
pursuing them are rooted in the central tenet of progressivism,
enunciated by his idols, that the American national government is
responsible for the reform and uplift of those "we" deem to be living
below "our" standards, and that "they" must be protected from their
oppressors. Obama's role models followed the logic of that moral calling
to the ends of the earth.

And though liberals are routinely chastised for their "secular
relativism," as Bill O'Reilly puts it, liberal statesmen who waged the
largest wars were driven by the Christian doctrine of "good works,"
often enunciated in Obama's speeches as the duty to be "our brother's
keeper." Whereas the traditional conservative notion of Christian
communal obligation is limited to one’s family or nation, Obama’s
political ancestors extended it to the world.

Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson declared that God had given
American leaders—"Christ's Army," according to Wilson—the divine duty to
"improve" the backward peoples of America and the world. Roosevelt and
Wilson used that rationale to establish modern progressivism and
American imperialism, both of which were part of what Roosevelt called
"the long struggle for the uplift of humanity." They argued that greater
government intervention, through social welfare and regulatory programs
at home and military incursions abroad, would remake American slums and
all the countries of the world into the Puritan ideal of a "city on a hill."

To fulfill this mission, Roosevelt championed many social-welfare
measures, including pure-food and worker-safety regulations, but he also
pushed the United States to attack Spain and occupy Cuba and the
Philippines—the so-called Spanish-American War, which historians
characterize as America's "first imperial war.” The assault and
subsequent occupations resulted in the deaths of more than 10,000
Cubans, several hundred thousand Filipino civilians, and 4,541 American
soldiers.

Wilson believed that to "Christianize the world" required the radical
expansion of government power. Along with fellow progressives in
Congress, Wilson established three classic progressive institutions: the
Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the federal
income tax. But Wilson's self-appointed obligation to rescue and
“redeem” all the world's people compelled him, beginning in 1916, to
push the country toward intervention in Europe with what many historians
call a "missionary zeal." The United States, he said, "must assume the
messianic mantle" and had "the right and duty to intervene whenever and
wherever" its leaders thought necessary. Some 116,000 U.S. servicemen
were killed and more than 200,000 wounded in World War I, which ended in
a virtual stalemate.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the next president to take up the liberal
mission. According to Robert Dallek's award-winning biography, the
origin of FDR's commitment to social-welfare programs and international
interventionism was "the Christian gentleman's ideal of service to the
less fortunate: the conviction that privileged Americans should take a
part in relieving national and international ills."

Long before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt urged intervention
against Japan's expansion in the Pacific. And there is considerable
evidence and substantial agreement among scholars that Roosevelt did
everything in his power to force Japan into a conflict with the United
States. Though Japan wished to avoid confrontation with its principal
trading partner, in 1937 Roosevelt suggested that military action was
needed to “quarantine the aggressor.” And beginning in 1940, he imposed
a series of embargoes on the island nation, which was almost entirely
dependent on U.S. imports for its industrial production. After Pearl
Harbor, Roosevelt promised both victory against Japan and "the
establishment of an international order in which the spirit of Christ
shall rule the hearts of men and nations."

Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, whose Baptist evangelical
upbringing informed his pledge “to win the world back to peace and
Christianity,” made immense incursions across the globe. Truman rejected
the doctrine of defensive "containment" of the Soviets in favor of a
"rollback" policy, elaborated by the CIA in 1950, to aggressively"
foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and
flourish." In September 1950, Truman turned the Korean War into an
all-out offensive mission by launching a military assault that pushed
North Korean communists deep into their own territory. A large portion
of the 37,000 American casualties in the war came during the offensive.

John F. Kennedy devoted his political career to realizing America's
"mission" to seize "direct control of world destiny." He campaigned for
the presidency in 1960 on the charges that Eisenhower had left the poor
to languish and allowed Communists to continue their subjugation of the
world’s innocents. In his inaugural address, Kennedy vowed to uplift
"those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to
break the bonds of mass misery."

To heed his calling for humankind meant making U.S. intervention in
Vietnam into a war. Kennedy increased the number of U.S. military
personnel there from a few hundred when he took office to 15,000 by the
time he was assassinated, and shipped massive amounts of military
equipment to the Vietnamese war zone.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama mentioned Lyndon Baines Johnson only
once and only in passing. Perhaps this was because Johnson's continued
escalation of both the Vietnam War—which resulted in the deaths of more
than 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and
civilians—and programs to help the poor caused the left to oppose
aggressive foreign policies and the right to turn militantly against
social-welfare initiatives. This halted, for three decades, the grand
liberal project of the 20th century.

The trinity of evangelism, large government intervention, and global
transformative aspirations was revived, ironically, in the Republican
administration of George W. Bush. It is well-documented that the
so-called neoconservatives in and around the Bush administration
identify with the very same presidents Obama admires. Indeed, their No
Child Left Behind program mandating standardized testing in public
schools, use of enhanced executive powers, and "regime-change" foreign
policy were anathema to traditional, "paleo" conservatives.

During his campaign, Obama echoed neoconservatives and channeled his
Democratic role models by declaring that the United States "must lead
the world, by deed and by example." Thus far the president and his
cabinet have pledged to expand and further centralize No Child Left
Behind and initiate New Deal-style public works projects, refused to
reduce the new powers of the presidency, expanded the military, and
called for "state-building" and interventions on behalf of "victims" in
Somalia, Congo, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma, Pakistan, and, most immediately,
in Afghanistan.

Those who call themselves liberals or progressives but are reluctant to
project American military force are now confronted with the question of
whether they wish to continue the renewal of the project that Obama
champions.

Thaddeus Russell has taught history, philosophy, and American Studies at
Columbia University, Barnard College, Eugene Lang College, and the New
School for Social Research. He is the author of Jimmy Hoffa and the
Remaking of the American Working Class (Knopf, 2001) and the forthcoming
A Renegade History of the United States (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010).

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Néstor Gorojovsky
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