America's Delusion

The U.S. is sick. The Sept. 11 attacks left it wounded and haggard, something that is obvious a mere 12 years later. However, we have only just begun to understand how serious the sickness is. The NSA affair has uncovered more than the phone calls and online habits of millions of people. The fact that the U.S. is spying on the world shows that it has become manic: It acts pathologically, intrusively and what it does bears no relationship to actual danger.

Since 2005, an average of 23 Americans have died each year from terrorist activity, mostly abroad. “More Americans die of falling televisions and other appliances than from terrorism,” writes Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times, “and 15 times as many die by falling off ladders.” The U.S. has spent $8 billion on defense and the military since 2001.

The real threats lie elsewhere. The biggest short-term danger is homemade: Over 30,000 Americans are killed by guns each year. American children are 13 times more likely to be shot than children in other industrialized nations. Against this threat, Congress and President Barack Obama have done little, or to be completely honest: nothing. They talk back and forth after every shooting, and the gun lobby, incurably sick, says all guns are necessary for self-defense.

Against real long-term dangers like climate change, America, the major culprit, does nothing. Or, to be fair: too little too late.

This is not to say that terrorism doesn’t exist: 9/11 happened and al-Qaida is still around. But spying on citizens and emails, on corporations and allies violates people’s rights. It is just as monstrous and unlawful as Guantanamo, where for 11 years people have been interned and force-fed, against whom there is often no evidence, but who cannot be freed today regardless, because they now hate America. This is as unlawful as drones, which kill people whose death warrants have been signed by Obama.

A political discussion of all this is unlikely. Spying stops attacks, says Obama, says Angela Merkel, and we have to believe them. That is how voters and citizens explain it to children, whose parents, the government, know what’s right. Does the “free” America we hear so much about still exist to be defended, or has it destroyed itself in its own defense?

Now We Know: There Is Only One America

An American government that supports a spy program like PRISM no longer respects anything or anyone. It plays all-powerful; it holds itself above the Constitution and civil rights, both in its own land and abroad. That Obama acts this way is dismaying. If it were Bush’s government, you could think: It’s just Bush; he is predictable; there is still a better America. Now we know: There is only one America. Did the old Harvard law Obama actually believe his speeches about the return of citizens’ rights? Can anybody be cynical enough to promise to heal the world, then do these things and, afterward, xenophobically explain that he’s really only spying on foreigners? Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela are Obama’s role models; what would they say?

The German government is acting disastrously weak. Merkel needs to say: You are manic, and what you are doing is sick. Friends say those things. Instead, she weighs every word; she doesn’t want to annoy the U.S. She doesn’t think the NSA and the Stasi are comparable, but they are, because things do not have to be identical to be comparable. The Stasi destroyed families; the NSA presumably does not. But the use of available technology, the propaganda, the greed for information, the belief that they are on the right, the “good” side … maybe there’s a pattern?

Angela Merkel has sworn to protect the German people from harm. To be constantly overheard and to have to anticipate that every email is being read — the loss of the private sphere — is harmful.

Every voter knows that politics can be ugly, because politics involves weighing values against each other. The deciding question is: What higher virtue justifies America’s infringement on civil rights and the cooperation of German services? It is time for answers.