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Europe and the United Suckers of America

June 17th, 2005

George Washington warned in his Farewell Address about moving beyond our "commercial relations" with foreign nations and getting embroiled in the "ordinary vicissitudes" of European politics and "the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities."   After tens of thousands of American deaths and a huge loss of treasure in the 20th century due to the vicissitudes of European politics, we haven't learned our lesson and are still losing lives and treasure on behalf of Europe.

We should start calling ourselves the United Suckers of America.

The latest example of Europe suckering the USA was President Bush's agreement with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to wipe out the debt of African nations. 

What Tony Blair should have done instead was call a conference of all the European nations that had colonized the African continent, carved it into artificial countries, and created many of the conditions and tensions that have led to today's tribal warfare and despotic regimes.  In addition to the United Kingdom, the conference attendees would include Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Germany - nations that pretend to be morally superior to the USA.
 

The objective of the conference would be for European nations to put a price tag on their looting of the continent and to dig into their own pockets to return the loot, plus interest.  In other words, Europe would for once take responsibility for its own actions and not ask the USA to come to the rescue.

The conference could open with a map of Africa immediately prior to the First World War.  The map would show that out of over 30 countries, only two, Ethiopia and Liberia were independent at the time.  It also would show that none was a colony of the USA.

Then the conference could shift to the First World War and how the war played out not only in Europe but also in Africa and the Middle East.  The conference could detail how Woodrow Wilson, the USA's only professor-president, got duped into participating in a European war in which the USA had little national interest, due to his naiveté, hubris and insular WASP view of the world.  Ten million were killed in the "war to end all wars," including 126,000 Americans.

What did the carnage accomplish, other than to leave wives without husbands, sisters without brothers and parents without sons?  It accomplished nothing positive, but it did lead to the Bolshevik Revolution; the carving up of the Middle East by the European powers after the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the creation of the artificial nation-state of Iraq by the British and their subsequent departure with their tail between their legs after failing to pacify the new nation; the plopping of a homeland for the Jews in the middle of Palestine by the British and their unilateral Balfour Declaration; the horrors of Stalin and Hitler; the carnage of the Second World War; the handing over of Eastern Europe to the Soviet dictatorship after WWII; and the Cold War, which was fought primarily with American money and lives and wouldn't have been necessary had the Bolsheviks not taken power after the First World War, which wouldn't have been necessary had it not been for the vicissitudes of European politics. 

A direct line leads from this sordid European history to today's problems in the Middle East, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.  Yet it is the USA that has taken responsibility for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a conflict that was caused by Europeans and should be ended by Europeans.  It is the USA that is being asked by the Europeans to pay for European colonialism in Africa.  It is the USA that is fighting a war in Iraq, a nation that was born from European imperialism.  And it is the USA that has allowed Europe to shift Arab and Moslem enmity for the West from Europe to the USA.    

We are indeed the United Suckers of America.