Remember that question everyone was asking after the 9/11 attacks: ''Why do they hate us?'' That was such an important question, but it was buried as quickly as it emerged. Churchill's essay was one of the few public attempts to answer it. He tried to start a national discussion about anti-Americanism; and while his tone might be abrasive, the answers he offered were (as always with his work) well-supported and reasonable: Americans are hated not because of some vague notion of their ''freedom,'' but for the specific reason that the United States is engaged in truly despicable practices abroad. Alongside those already mentioned, we can now add the return of such medieval practices as detainment without charge, ''trial'' without attorneys, and worst of all, torture.
Ultimately, Churchill's point was to wake Americans up to the impending Israelification of this country: the making of an absolute security state defined by perpetual cycles of militarism, attack and response. Do you want to live in a country like that? It doesn't have to be that way, but the United States is hurting the planet and its peoples.
what is left out here is the religious component, otherwise it is profoundly correct. Elements in the US feel passionately that they can create a nation-state in the same form as Israel, for evangelical, fundamentalist christians. Armed with the most sophisticated weaponry, controlled to the nth degree with technology and ultra-nasty privately contracted mercenary forces, the new zealots will model their future Reich after the Zionist manifesto.
If we live in a democracy, Churchill implies, then we need to take responsibility for the actions of our government. Otherwise, some people on the receiving end of U.S. brutality will see no viable option but to push back, as did past figures like Crazy Horse, Geronimo and Tecumseh. Remember them?
