Translated from MSZ 3-1983

USA:

An American ideology

The USA: “I believe we are destined to be the beacon of hope for all mankind. With God’s help, we can make it so.” (President Reagan)

The Soviet Union: “A regime which explicitly rejects the law and the love of God.” (his Secretary of Defense Weinberger)

The leading men and women of the Reagan administration rarely speak of “intellectual leadership” like their admirer Helmut Kohl. They straightforwardly invoke the personal guidance of the Great Spirit for their policies. “Enlightened” Europeans are mistaken in their critical reaction to statements such as those quoted above in both versions: Reagan’s subsumption of the world under the moral principle of good versus evil is neither a mere ideological addition to “realpolitik,” nor does the pious upward gaze in preparation for World War III deserve the verdict of bigoted hypocrisy. It’s worse: ideologies are taken seriously out of the deepest conviction.

God’s Own Country

Nothing is more mistaken than the prevailing impression in Europe that the ideological swagger of the current US leader is a special feature of the Reagan team. One need only recall his predecessor Jimmy Carter, whose election campaign was designed as a “crusade” from Atlanta to Washington in order to re-establish a home for the Christian principles of the pioneers in the White House. Since its founding with the “Declaration of Independence,” the oldest democracy in the Western world has invoked its deepest foundation in the higher realm. In their constitution, the intellectual founding fathers of the USA, mostly descendants of European emigrants who had fled the divine right of absolutist princes, replaced the individual sovereign with the free and equal American people, and elevated their majority vote to the status of divinely blessed will on earth.

The success of the American state in all its previous wars and no less in the subsequent peacetimes has made God such a reliable ally of the Stars and Stripes that it is by now quite open who here can feel more flattered in the appeal to him: the Americans on account of their divine patron or the latter himself because – no matter what – he definitely has the USA on his side:

“Man has known only a few moments of freedom in all his history up to now, and most of those moments belong to us.” (Reagan)

In the ups and downs of the European world of states, each of the nations has the blessing of Kingdom Come on their side in their worldy ventures when the situation gets serious, but in times of peace this is not a special argument for policies; at most it’s a predicate for the attitude in which they are made – and that is debatable (“You of all people, Mr. Kohl, as a politician who invokes Christianity...”). There is no mass party in the USA that calls itself programmatically “Christian.” That would be a complete misnomer without a chance in a state system where a non-Christian is already “un-American” and no relevant “socialist” party has ever existed for the same reason. The names of the two major parties have no bearing on the cause they represent, and as long as they always promote the greatness of the nation, no US politician needs to invoke his “better” intentions: his actions must stand up to the scrutiny of a nation that proudly claims to be first in the world because this is its God-chosen destiny. American politicians do indeed have an ideology with which they “justify” their policies, but they have no ideological differences. Thus, in their statements about the “philosophy” that guides them, they constantly cite the names of former presidents simply so that everyone realizes that the endlessly varied, same old sayings about greatness and destiny are also part of a tradition.

They are made topical by defining the concrete objectives of national politics and naming the enemy that stands in their way. Nothing has changed in this respect since the conquest of the West and the “inevitable” extermination of the Indians. The joke, however, is not that US imperialism, which wants to conquer the whole world for the West and therefore wants to get at the “Reds” of our day, is actually illustrating its political worldview according to the dramaturgy of a Western. The explosiveness of Reagan’s Old Testament-inspired sermons lies rather in that there is a material force behind them: World Power No. 1!

The Land of the Brave...

“Those who have sacrificed their lives for our country serve as a reminder that our work is unfinished.” (Reagan, Memorial Day Proclamation 1983)

Every nation remembers its fallen soldiers, including West Germany, which remembers the Nazi army dead insofar as they too were sacrificed for the fatherland. Only the world power USA, which has won all its wars and has now successfully completed its moral rehabilitation after the punitive attack on Vietnam, allows its dead warriors to continue to serve: as memorial activists for the completion of a mission that cannot be achieved without sacrifice and war. Even though, with the exception of the Civil War, the USA has only deployed its troops to conquer or “pacify” foreign territory, its soldiers have fallen to protect the nation: a boundless national interest.

“Each year, for more than 100 years, we have gathered on Memorial Day to pay tribute to those men and women who have fallen in battle, sacrificing their lives to preserve our freedom and world peace. In doing this, we are reminded that neither peace nor liberty is guaranteed, and that our national ideals remain threatened by global conflict, economic crises, violence, and aggression.” (Reagan, ibid.)

Dying in state service is “America’s Secret Life-giving Weapon” (John A. Howard, President of the Rockford Institute, speaking to the Rotary Club in November 1982) because dying a miserable death for this has so far been worth it. Lack of willingness to die for the nation’s values therefore means having no right to live and not being a true American.

Anyone who “says that there is nothing worth dying for, says that there is nothing worth living for.”

This democratic version of the Spanish fascists’ civil war slogan “Viva la muerte!” is no mere invention of a fanatical Reagan supporter, but the global political conclusion of a patriotism that has always been able to commemorate its dead at victory celebrations and now refuses to see why it should be unsettled by the fact that the next time someone dies for America, the parade after the war ends could be scant due to a lack of survivors. European arrogance can’t pride itself on any difference in the substance of its ideology: Better red than dead – this quote from Schiller’s William Tell is part of the Western cultural heritage (“Better to die than live in servitude,...”). The shock at Haig’s inaugural speech about “more important things than peace” was not a rejection of violence and war in this country either, but a muted distrust of an ally which found expression in the arch-nationalist rejection of “Battlefield Europe.”

The only difference is that America’s wars have all paid off, so war is truly celebrated here without hesitation as the father and mother of the nation and all its values. George Washington insisted on the signature text “Done in the Trenches” when signing the Articles of Capitulation of the British troops on October 19, 1781, and the current US Secretary of the Army John O. Marsh Jr. referred to this event in a speech to representatives on January 26, 1983: Under the title “Soviet Realities” not a single true remark about Soviet policy, but rather along the lines of –

“This is a poignant reminder that free men sometimes have to go into the trenches for freedom!” –

a single hymn to the US soldier as the guarantee of being able to cope with any “Soviet reality”:

“physically tough ünd mentally prepared, he has the individual ability to fight and survive”

The unpretentious enumeration of soldierly qualities as a guarantee of national ideals –

“what is at stake are values and value systems”

this is the unself-consciousness of the American ideology in upholding virtues that fascism discredited for some time in West Germany. That they “made America great,” however, is only half the truth: on the other hand, it is the violently enforced greatness of America that makes a national hero out of everyone who has killed or died on its behalf and entitles the nation to ever new, greater claims.

...The Land of the Free

The American ideology has been so successful in the rise of the nation to world power No. 1 that its victory messages, held at the graves of those slain in its name, are now in every school textbook as documents of a better human race. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is regarded as the definition of democracy par excellence –

“Government of the people, by the people, for the people”

and no one has any doubts about this famous institution because even then 50,000 dead Southerners “with the help of God” were the price for ensuring that freedom “shall not perish from the earth.”

Today, when these chimes of freedom are not being sung as a victory celebration after battle, but are being used by the Reagan administration to sound the global call to arms for freedom in order to finally make the disruptive part of the world of states disappear completely from the earth, some in the “old world” are pricking up their ears:

Not because the USA does not let a day go by without a new reason for war being presented to the USSR somewhere in Asia, Africa and Latin America as part of some “peace settlement.”

Not because the USA is expanding its global weapons arsenal by the hour, according to the maxim: as much as possible in the shortest possible time.

Not because the USA is subjecting its own people to an “austerity program” that is causing famine in Detroit.

Certainly not because the program of freedom brings death and misery to those who are happy with it and saved from communist bondage.

And certainly not because their own rulers, especially those in Bonn, are involved in planning, implementing, in short: taking part in it.

It is the tone and not the music that disturbs discerning ears – which do not want to notice the power of Reagan or Kohl, but rather their unworthy interpretation of it.

This kind of stylistic criticism is in fact anti-Americanism: from the vantage point of superior Western cultural humanity, the rhetoric used by US politicians and ideologues to elevate the joint NATO course to the status of a world-historical mission to bring happiness to humanity is considered either overly exaggerated or simply trite. The critical European point of view overlooks the fact that nothing else is being heard from America other than its own idealisms, which are used to “justify” democratic rule and violence wherever Western freedom is enforced. The difference is nothing other than the material basis of the ideology, which in the case of the USA is the world’s number one economic and political power. And because a successfully asserted interest still justifies any idea, Western Europe, where this interest is shared, is in the process of no longer allowing itself to have any ideological differences either.