Today America Has Become the Nightmare
Peter Schultz
In reading
L. Fletcher Prouty’s book, JFK: The CIA,
Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, I read this quote
from Arnold Toynbee, written in the NY
Times in 1971, but still and maybe more relevant today.
“To most Europeans…America now
looks like the most dangerous country in the world. Since America is
unquestionably the most powerful country, the transformation of America’s image
within the last thirty years is very frightening for Europeans. It is probably
still more frightening for the great majority of the human race who are neither
European nor North Americans, but are Latin Americans, Asians, and Africans.
They, I imagine, feel even more insecure than we feel. They feel that, at any
moment, America may intervene in their internal affairs, with the same
appalling consequences as have followed from the American intervention in
Southeast Asia.
“For the
world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for
America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of
us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA
is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America’s phobia about world
communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to
make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been
reversed in the world’s eyes. Today America has become the nightmare.” [pp.
230-31]
Suffice it
to say about Prouty’s book that it is concerned with arguing that John F.
Kennedy was aware of these dangers and sought to corral the CIA and the US
policies of waging limited war throughout the world. And as a result, Prouty
argues, Kennedy was assassinated. Seems rather extreme to me but then so does
how the US behaves today throughout the world.
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