Erkan's field diary

Evangelicals, hate speech, and US foreign policy

Nejdan YILDIZ

Europe should beware not to antagonise US on climate change

Europeans would be well-advised to examine the US presidential candidates' climate plans rather than focus on the Bush administration, writes Stephen Boucher, co-secretary general of Notre Europe, a Paris-based think thank.

No, Hillary Clinton, It’s Shame on You: More on Clinton’s Racism (updated)

By Maximilian Forte on U.S.

Of course this issue cannot be laid to rest until it gets wider, more meaningful recognition, not to mention some profuse apologizing from Hillary Clinton and the white troops in her white-oriented campaign. If one wants to have a discussion about race and gender, then one way not to preclude the need for any such discussion is to do as Clinton: proving that being black in America still carries greater stigma than being a woman, and bears a greater load of disadvantage, mistrust, and hostility. This post was motivated by three items; let’s go through each of these in turn.

First, in an editorial by Geoffrey Dunn inBlack Star Newstitled, “Hillary Clinton’s Disgraceful Campaign: Racism and Hypocrisy” (23 April, 2008), which echoes many of the same sentiments inmy previous post on this topic, we read the following, an extract provided here:

A Pastor's Influence

By David S. Broder

In his achingly slow steps toward repudiating the repugnant words of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama has run the risk of serious political damage by leaving vague what it was that attracted him to this outspoken critic of American society.

A White Woman’s Burden: Hillary Clinton, Imperialism, and Racism

By Maximilian Forte on white man's burden

The imperialist syndrome that has been institutionalized at least since 1492 in the Americas, with its familiar register of notions of superiority, a right to dominate, of the civilizing beneficence of Western rule, of force needed to tame wild creatures so that they can learn to take responsibility, with routinized actions and customary rituals, acting through mechanisms of inequality, is not something that can be shed overnight. It is too lucrative, and too self-affirming, at least for a while. As the United States enters its own phase of Soviet-style structural fatigue, we might see greater internal critiques of imperial manifest destiny, but for now, and as evidenced in the current electoral campaign in the United States, this syndrome is still firmly in place. Indeed, none of those who are presented as alternatives, promise an alternative to quests for continued imperial dominance abroad, and heightened national “security” (fear, surveillance) at home.

McCain's crackpot ideas

Blake Hounshell

Fareed Zakaria rightly notes that while everyone has been beating up on Barack Obama for proposing talks with Chávez and Ahmadinejad, John McCain has quietly espoused some genuine crackpot ideas about foreign policy. Especially wrongheaded is his idea to create a "League of Democracies," which would only antagonize Russia and China, two great powers whose cooperation the United States needs on a host of regional and global issues. (Paul Saunders ably dispatched a similar plan mooted by McCain advisor Robert Kagan and Obama advisor Ivo Daalder last August, but some bad ideas just won't die.)