Left to The Left

Not long ago I had a talk with a conservative member of parliament from Bavaria who had once spent a year in a prestigious American university. He looked back on his sojourn in the United States with great pleasure, but when the subject of American foreign policy came up, he was markedly pessimistic. This is the gist of what he said:

Did the Americans—or for that matter the British—ever really understand the outside world? John Adams held the Americans responsible for the sanguinary French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. This may be exaggeration, but the Americans and the British certainly had a hand in the “liberation” of Hispanic America; that this was a success is far from obvious. And what about Commodore Perry, who opened Japan to Western civilization? Did his expedition not somehow contain the notion that America would be acting as a benefactor by Westernizing Asians? Americans always want to do something good, but some of the worst crimes are inadvertently committed by do-gooders.

EK

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Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

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Not long ago I had a talk with a conservative member of parliament from Bavaria who had once spent a year in a prestigious American university. He looked back on his sojourn in the United States with great pleasure, but when the subject of American foreign policy came up, he was markedly pessimistic. This is the gist of what he said:

Did the Americans—or for that matter the British—ever really understand the outside world? John Adams held the Americans responsible for the sanguinary French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. This may be exaggeration, but the Americans and the British certainly had a hand in the “liberation” of Hispanic America; that this was a success is far from obvious. And what about Commodore Perry, who opened Japan to Western civilization? Did his expedition not somehow contain the notion that America would be acting as a benefactor by Westernizing Asians? Americans always want to do something good, but some of the worst crimes are inadvertently committed by do-gooders.