Yes, I apologize for not having read the article to its very end. But it does not change my statement: "feeling inferior" just only means feeling helpless against a superpower such as the US. The Swiss army, as far as I know, is simply not geared towards a war of aggression, unlike the US army. Perhaps the core sentence of the article is: Switzerland has long known the feeling of being treated like an underdog - something many European countries and even the United Nations are currently experiencing at the hands of the US. So, I do not see where Swiss chauvinism could come into play here. On the other hand, the blatant and uninterrupted CNN-style of US chauvinism is hardly bearable. I feel sorry for those people who actually have to live in the US with an opinion which differs from that of the official louts. Here is a good example for what I mean, which I am sure most Americans are cringing about with shame: NEW YORK: A lawyer was arrested late Monday and charged with trespassing at a public mall in the state of New York after refusing to take off a T-shirt advocating peace that he had just purchased at the mall. According to the criminal complaint filed on Monday, Stephen Downs was wearing a T-shirt bearing the words âGive Peace A Chanceâ that he had just purchased from a vendor inside the Crossgates Mall in Guilderland, New York, near Albany. âI was in the food court with my son when I was confronted by two security guards and ordered to either take off the T-shirt or leave the mall,â said Downs. When Downs refused the security officers' orders, police from the town of Guilderland were called and he was arrested and taken away in handcuffs, charged with trespassing âin that he knowingly enter(ed) or remain(ed) unlawfully upon premises,â the complaint read. Downs said police tried to convince him he was wrong in his actions by refusing to remove the T-shirt because the mall âwas like a private house and that I was acting poorlyâ. â Reuters So, a guy who happens to be against what the published opinion of Rupert Murdoch has been ranting about since a long time and who wears a T-shirt quoting the Beatles' song title "Give peace a chance" is handcuffed and charged with trespassing in a public mall? What do you call that? If it is not chauvinism, give me a better word for that sort of terrorism.
Roe, abuses are everywhere. The USA is not the exception. I can actually understand what ahppened to the shopping complex visitor. He was told to either remove the offensive (to management) T-shirt or else leave the premises. When one has been ordered to elave private premises and refuses one is guilty of tresspassing. Hence the police involvement. I read today about something which happened in Saudi Arabia where a husband was put in jail because his wife was accused of stealing hospital equipment. He is looking at an unhealthy jail sentence and presently is receiving 300 lashes, 50 at a time on a weekly (or fortnightly basis - I cannot exactly remember) basis because as a husband he is deemed to be aware of what his wife is doing and therefore he is automatically guilty of the crime his wife is allegedly accused of having committed. He is 'lucky' in a way because the cleric in charge at the hospital has decided that the foreigner shouldn't be whipped with a free arm but that the people who are doing the lashing should carry the koran under their upper arm thus restricting the severity of the lashes. (lucky devil). He was apparently also under pressure to convert to Islam so as to make his stay in the prison more bearable. Now innocent (???) Switzerland too is not averse to committing some abuses. I know someone who a few years ago was arrested and held incommunicado for FOUR months and thence released without having been charged !!!! No he wasn't a terrorist. His 'crime' ? Having been caught with a considerable amount of cash in his luggage. (about $ 40,000 so I understand). freealways
You can call it chauvinism, you can call it anti-americanism, it is all semantics to me. The article is absolutely unambiguous - the Swiss are the most anti-american country in Europe. 'Opinion polls show that Switzerland is the most anti-American nation among other European countries, and the majority of the population is not only against US policies but also opposes the country's culture'. You seem to find it absolutely appropriate and acceptable that Europeans are anti-american, but pro-american americans are "chauvinists" according to you. I am glad you are able to maintain fair and balanced opinion. You want to know about anti-american sentiment and chauvinism - read the following article: 'Ugly sentiments sting American tourists as Europeans cite frustrations with U.S. policy' http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/usatoday/20030304/ts_usatoday/4913893 Although I am pretty sure you will find a way to "explain" and justify why it is OK to call Americans pigs and spit on them. And god forbid we ever say anything bad about Switzerland or France, we'll be "chauvinists". The country is divided, almost half of it are wearing anti-war signs and t-shirts, going to anti-war demonstrations, they can even burn american flag if they want to. People freely express their opinions. Nevertheless you pick on one incident and present it here as if we are another North Korea or Iraq. Personally I believe what happened was wrong and disgusting. I am sure overwhelming majority of americans of any political orientation are also disgusted. I also believe it will backfire and they will lose a lot of business. But the mall is indeed private property so what they did was probably legal. The guy was on a property which did not belong to him and where he was not wanted. He was asked to leave and refused. He was not arrested for his political views, he was arrested for trespassing, cause being on the land of other without permission is indeed trespassing. If americans have freedom to disagree with the govenment, make fun of it, curse it, burn american flag etc, the mall owners and employees sure have freedom not to do business with people they do not like. Freedom works both ways, you know. And is it really any different then "Americans are not allowed/wellcome" signs on certain restaurants and bars overseas. How come you are not objecting to those? Double standard again.
Since when was it cooler to be Canadian? "Americans not welcome", "No dogs and Chinese allowed" and other such stupidity are just expressions of people whose daily encounter with literature is limited to page 3 of such gutter papers as "The Sun" in Britain and similar products elsewhere. And the ubiquitous taxi-driver, whom reporters like to quote when they have not been invited to the government briefing. My goodness: most taxi-drivers in Berlin are probably not even Germans. Like most of the drivers I had when I was in New York were Punjabi! Yes, it can be unpleasant when you are in the wrong crowd, like having Japanese immigrants as parents during WW2 or a jewish grandmother in Germany at that time. Or being white and owning a farm in Zimbabwe these days. Coming back to chauvinism, a definition which I found (http://www.bartleby.com/61/18/C0261800.html) says: "NOUN: 1. Militant devotion to and glorification of one's country; fanatical patriotism. 2. Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one's own gender, group, or kind: âthe chauvinism . . . of making extraterrestrial life in our own imageâ (Henry S.F. Cooper, Jr.). ETYMOLOGY: French chauvinisme, after Nicolas Chauvin, a legendary French soldier famous for his devotion to Napoleon. " Most probably those simpletons in the Paris Metro or the Berlin cabbie automatically believe that those unlucky persons who happened to be near them, would automatically belong into that category, and that's why they thought they deserve such treatment. Just remember, most Europeans only know about America what they see on TV: Soapies, McDonalds and CNN, and most probably most Americans do not approve of that. I like the thingie about Canadians, though.
re: The US Patriot Act The US Suffered Through Turmoil in '98 - 1798, That Is by Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe Columnist, 12/28/98 (Guest Commentator) So shocking were the president's deeds, so extreme were his opponents, so furiously did partisan passions roil the public, that by the end of '98 some of the nation's most eminent leaders were questioning whether America's experiment with constitutional democracy was coming undone. No, not the Clinton scandals. The year was 1798. John Adams was in the White House and the United States was undergoing an agony of political turmoil. It was a bitter time, but it produced two of the most remarkable statements on liberty and limited government in our history - the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798. Americans were sharply divided over a host of issues that year, none more so than US-French relations. The Federalists, who controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, deeply mistrusted the French revolutionaries and refused to support them when France went to war with Britain. Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson were sympathetic to the French cause, which they identified with America's own revolt against royal abuse two decades earlier. The Jeffersonians denounced Adams and the Federalists as "monarchists" and "Tories" - denunciations echoed by a growing population of anti-British immigrants. Angered by Washington's neutrality, France began seizing American vessels. US diplomats in France were snubbed. A scandal erupted - the famous XYZ Affair - when agents of the French foreign minister, Talleyrand, demanded a bribe from President Adams's emissaries. Federalists were outraged; war fever swept the country. There were rumors that France was planning an invasion - and that Vice President Jefferson, whose Republican supporters were violently condemning the federal government, would join the invaders and overthrow the Adams administration. In this superheated atmosphere, Congress and the president enacted a package of grotesquely unconstitutional laws. The Alien Enemies Act empowered the president to jail or expel without trial any foreigner he deemed "dangerous to the peace." The Sedition Act prohibited all criticism of federal officials made "with intent to defame." Just seven years after the ratification of the First Amendment, editors, printers, and politicians were hauled into court and sent to prison for the crime of opposing the president. Jefferson and James Madison - who called the Sedition Act a "monster that must forever disgrace its parents" - resolved to strike back. Knowing that a Supreme Court fight would lose (the bench was dominated by Federalists), they decided to attack through the state legislatures. Working with allies in Kentucky and Virginia, Jefferson and Madison arranged for each state's general assembly to adopt a statement protesting the new laws. Jefferson drafted the Kentucky resolution, which was passed on Nov. 16, 1798. Madison wrote the Virginia resolution, which was adopted on Christmas Eve. "Resolved," the Kentucky Legislature declared in its opening paragraph, "that whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force." Supreme authority in America, it argued, was held not by the federal government but by the people and the states, and Congress and the president had only those powers clearly delegated to them by the Constitution. The Alien and Sedition Acts were intolerable above all because the federal government had no right to enact them. In the 20th century, the 10th Amendment has been largely ignored, but in the Kentucky Resolution, Jefferson quoted it repeatedly: "It is true as a general principle, and is also expressly declared by one of the amendments to the Constitution, that `the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.'" Nothing in the Constitution gave federal officials any right to interfere with freedom of speech or the press, or to exercise any jurisdiction over aliens. "Therefore, the act of Congress passed on the 14th day of July, 1798 ... is not law, but is altogether void, and of no effect." The Virginia Resolution was also blunt. Congress and the president, Madison wrote, have only the powers "enumerated in that compact [the Constitution]; and that in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the said compact, the states ... have the right and are duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil." These resolutions weren't empty theory. They were a forceful defense of freedom, and a reminder that when governments are allowed to infringe the liberty of A, it is only a matter of time before they move on to B's. "The friendless alien has indeed been selected as the safest subject of a first experiment," declared the Kentucky resolution, "but the citizen will soon follow - or rather has already followed, for already has a Sedition Act marked him as its prey." Jefferson and Madison were fearful, as more Americans should be today, of allowing power to be concentrated in the central government. They won the battle: Americans came to hate the Alien and Sedition Acts, and the Federalists were thrown out in the election of 1800. But did they win the war? In our day, the federal government has grown monstrous, strangling Americans' freedom through endless regulations, restrictions, and taxes. The bicentennial of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions reminds us how much we have lost - and points the way to win it back. Copyrighted by Boston Globe.
thanks anyway, but all that garbage about history is for the French and for traitors, modern Americans don't need that crap. there may have been thousands of instances of lying and propaganda and abuse of power before, but the past is the past. this time it is different. human nature has changed. politics has changed. we know because they said so on the news.
Good, so Americans and their allies can forget "all that garbage about history"? Hell, why then did Jack Straw make that remark when talking in the UN Security Council about him also coming from a very old country formed by the French in 1066? If you try to portrait Americans as the "Forest Gump"-type of ignoramuses, you're doing a great job. Because just slinging mud at your French and German ancestors for their war crimes (or, as the tenor goes in the case of the French, their inability to commit war-crimes) smacks of the kind of blindness that gives certain Americans those funny looks. "Why does everybody hate us? We only meant to help you". Should we add one more to the 5 most common lies? E.g. "The US Army and our allies are here to rebuild your nation"?
Judges for War Crimes Court Sworn In By REUTERS Filed at 1:18 p.m. ET THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The world's first permanent war crimes court swore in its first 18 judges Tuesday to try the 21st century's worst crimes in a move hailed as the biggest legal milestone since Hitler's henchmen were tried at Nuremberg. Amid pomp and ceremony, the judges at the International Criminal Court, or ICC, 11 men and seven women, were sworn in to try people accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.
I am glad, MSFE, that you pointed this out. And I am looking forward to having some American war criminals hauled before this court. Especially after they have arrived in Iraq: it will be fun to watch what's-his-name Tommy Franks, Iraq's first president after SH defending himself like those Nazis did in Nuremberg:"I acted on order"! Yeah right!