Why does the world hate us?
               10 million dead, that's why.

Their Time Horizons Are Not Ours     A reader has asked, "Alright, some American shot a man's brother, but the aid given could be viewed as penance, couldn't it?"
    In most cases, no, for at least two reasons. First, much foreign aid is overt or covert assistance not to the people who have been harmed, but to their ruthless governments. US money, weapons, training, and intelligence information are used to suppress the population and kill rebels.
    Even food and blankets given to the poor are, also, aid to the governments. The rulers take credit for arranging this aid, and thereby enjoy a public relations coup over the groups trying to raise rebellions against them.
    A second reason aid is not penance is the difference in time horizons between Americans and most other nationalities, especially in the Mideast. To assume that feeding a man's children will cause him to forgive us for shooting his brother is to assume the brother's death is a bygone. It happened long ago, and the father of the children is willing to move past it.
    America is an unusually young country, founded just a bit more than two and quarter centuries ago. To an American, something that happened, say, ten years ago, is a long, long time in the past, a bygone. Something that happened a hundred years ago is totally forgotten.
    In the Mideast, Jericho is the oldest known city in the world; it's history has been traced back more than 10,000 years.
    This means Mideast civilization is 44 times older than American civilization.
    In America, wounds inflicted in the Mideast by the US government a hundred years ago were forgotten before any American today was born. To the people who live in the Mideast, however, the wound happened, in American terms, just a bit more than two years ago.
    The 1983 shelling of Muslim villages in Lebanon by the battleship New Jersey will not be forgotten for several centuries.
    Incidentally, this difference in time horizons between Americans and people in the Mideast is part of the strategy of the war. Washington's enemies have patience few Americans can imagine, because for them time is different. Where an American would wait no longer than, say, six months to get revenge for a given injury, someone in the Mideast might work on the project for 20 years.
    That's one reason the present war, World War III, is likely to last centuries.

Arrogance and Interests
    In their government-controlled schools, Americans are taught that their nation is uniquely endowed with virtue. By bringing their political and economic system to others, Americans are doing God's work.
    This colossal hubris is based on the conviction that America's form of capitalism and politics is right and true for everyone. The arrogance denies that culture and tradition can shape the human psyche - that there can be a different way of life for others.
    Ironically, intervention by America in the affairs of others has repeatedly been far less about political ideals than about America's "interests." Vital interests, national interests, security interests - all these phrases remain undefined, but they have served to explain why Washington has the right and duty to meddle in other countries.
    A fascinating book by historian R.J. Rummel is DEATH BY GOVERNMENT. Rummel documents the body counts of numerous cutthroat governments, including those of China, Russia, Pakistan and others backed by the White House and Congress.
    From my own research, I estimate that, in support of foreign tyrants, the White House and Congress since 1898 have killed, or aided and abetted the killing, of at least 10 million innocent people.
    I consider 10 million a very conservative estimate, and if someone proves the number is 50 million, I won't have any trouble believing it. The cases listed in this report are only those we can document. Much of the government's activity in other countries is secret.
    As tragic as those results are for the people of those nations, America itself is no better off for it. All these millions have family and friends who won't soon forget. As a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the NEW YORK TIMES and BOSTON GLOBE, Stephen Kinzer has reported from more than fifty countries. He says,

Most American-sponsored 'regime change' operations have, in the end, weakened rather than strengthened American security. They have produced generations of militants who are deeply and sometimes violently anti-American; expanded the borders that the United States feels obligated to defend, thereby increasing the number of enemies it must face and drawing it ever more deeply into webs of foreign entanglement; and emboldened enemies of the United States by showing that despite awesome power, it has a soft and vulnerable underbelly.1

    More than 200 years after its noble beginnings, America has pursued foreign policies that betray the original American principles. Upon leaving office, George Washington warned against an interventionist foreign policy:

... a passionate attachment of one Nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and Wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification...2

    Why does so much of the world hate us? Kinzer:

The United States has been a world power since the end of the nineteenth century. By using its might to overthrow foreign governments, it acted not in a new or radical way but in accordance with a long-established law of history. When no power restrained it, it did not restrain itself.3

    The Bill of Rights stops at the border.
    And, political power corrupts the morals and the judgment. History teaches no clearer lesson. That's why there is a Bill of Rights.
    The editor of Global Changes and Opportunities Report, Jim Powell, sums it up: "The US is an equal opportunity supporter of repressive governments. We love 'em all."