Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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That in America, the primary function of the government has never, ever, as the last two presidents like to endlessly tell us, been to “protect the nation from external attack.” No nation, especially one that maintains a worldwide empire and that arrogates to itself the “right” to engage in torture, kidnapping, extra-judicial killing and the unprovoked invasion of countries can, or should, be immune from the slightest suggestion of blowback. To suggest otherwise is to spin infantilizing fantasies that, in the end, lead only to the curtailment of our own liberties.

That a society that allows laws to be portrayed (and used) not as the blueprint of universal hopes and desires across time, but rather as the plaything of the rich and powerful, condemns itself to a downward spiral of seething internecine conflict, or, alternatively, to the ever-greater imposition, by those same rich and powerful people, of repressive measure designed to keep that seething sense of injustice from threatening their interests.