Tom Dispatch has an interesting take on who the Americans now see as their enemy...
The introduction to a piece by Ira Chernus (see here) on Tom Dispatch says, commenting on events post 9/11, this....
"Fifteen disastrous years later, having engaged in wars, occupations, or conflicts in at least seven countries in the Greater Middle East, having left failed or failing states littered in our path and spurred the spread of terror groups throughout that region and beyond, we now find ourselves in the age of Trump, and if it isn’t obvious to you that everything remains dangerously out of whack, it should be. Consider the set of former military men and associated figures the new president has appointed to run the national security state. As TomDispatch regular and professor of religious studies Ira Chernus points out today, they uniformly believe -- shades of GWOT -- that our country is in a literal “world war” at this very second, and they seem to believe as well that its fate and the planet's are at stake, even if none of them can quite decide whom it is we’re actually fighting. This struggle against, well, whomever, is so apocalyptic that, in their opinion, our very “Judeo-Christian” civilization is at stake. (Hence the recent Muslim ban, even if not quite called that.) On all of this, Chernus offers their own grim, whacked-out words as proof.
Who could deny that, by now, many Americans have lost the ability to see the world as it is, put much of anything in perspective, or sort out genuine threats from fantasy constructs? As a result, we’re led by delusional officials overseen, as if in some terrible Hollywood flick about the declining Roman Empire, by a mad, driven leader (who may be quite capable, in a matter of months, of turning the whole world against us)."
The introduction to a piece by Ira Chernus (see here) on Tom Dispatch says, commenting on events post 9/11, this....
"Fifteen disastrous years later, having engaged in wars, occupations, or conflicts in at least seven countries in the Greater Middle East, having left failed or failing states littered in our path and spurred the spread of terror groups throughout that region and beyond, we now find ourselves in the age of Trump, and if it isn’t obvious to you that everything remains dangerously out of whack, it should be. Consider the set of former military men and associated figures the new president has appointed to run the national security state. As TomDispatch regular and professor of religious studies Ira Chernus points out today, they uniformly believe -- shades of GWOT -- that our country is in a literal “world war” at this very second, and they seem to believe as well that its fate and the planet's are at stake, even if none of them can quite decide whom it is we’re actually fighting. This struggle against, well, whomever, is so apocalyptic that, in their opinion, our very “Judeo-Christian” civilization is at stake. (Hence the recent Muslim ban, even if not quite called that.) On all of this, Chernus offers their own grim, whacked-out words as proof.
Who could deny that, by now, many Americans have lost the ability to see the world as it is, put much of anything in perspective, or sort out genuine threats from fantasy constructs? As a result, we’re led by delusional officials overseen, as if in some terrible Hollywood flick about the declining Roman Empire, by a mad, driven leader (who may be quite capable, in a matter of months, of turning the whole world against us)."
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