About US

Many people rail what they call my hostility to US; however, nothing could be further removed from the truth, the more so as ,in a sense,US does not exist, does not yet exist.Those initial settlers on the American continent were certainly looked upon as the dregs of Mankind .For a very long time, what was to become known as US was a haven only to those who had been, somehow or other, been driven away from Europe: they were the outcasts of Europe, those whom Europe did want of, or who could not really internalize the European frame of mind,its inherent philosophy,and its modus vivendi.But at the same time, those people could not, especially after they had come into contact with other people, other races as some would say,but view themselves as Europeans, spontaneously identifying themselves with those very people who had kicked them away, maybe because they thought that they might thus emulate them in their confrontation with the Red Indians. Since the very beginning, an element of amphibology characterizes the US : it is as friendly an as hostile as possible, at the same time , to the European spirit.The European spirit is something it would fain know nothing about, but then that's impossible,it's like a shirt of Nessus that keeps clinging to the flesh of its soul; it's equally something it would like to replicate and perhaps even to improve, very much like the country bumpkin who dreams of outdoing the city aristocrat, but it would shy away from any attempt, out of shame, out of an in-bred inferiority complex, out of fear of ridicule and failure.
This incapacity of US of being itself and its inability to transcend its past have dogged it constantly throughout its history, as it vigorously strove to be itself , to grow up, haunted by what it admires and rejects at the same time.They probably offer the best explanation to the dilemma of the US spirit,a spirit in the making, still prisoner of its past, and I'm not even ,here, referring to the genocide of the Red Indians, slavery, racism and segregation, colonialism, expansionism , all of which are , since the very beginning , the basic constituents of the US genome,if I may say so, unable , albeit its mighty and very real efforts, which have very often culminated into ridicule, as exemplified by the gigantism of US architecture and a general propensity for whatever is huge to the point of deformation , to assert itself as an autonomous entity.They equally account for neurotic nature of US and its unrelenting aggressivity, the symptoms of an uneasy mind and a disturbed spirit.
If we take the War of Independence for example, nothing could be more alien, in spite of its Lockean inspiration, to the European spirit, but ( curiously?) the heroes of the Revolution, people like Jefferson, Madison, and even Franklin, were still Europeans , one might even add: primarily Europeans, in spite of their being clearly representative of a newly -emerging spirit.One could have thought or even hoped that US would be the negation, the undialectic antithesis of Europe, and for all anyone knows, that may well be what US is fundamentally, promises to be, but what it certainly is not; so far at least.At best, US can so far only be considered as being the fulfillment, the realization of Europe, but a fulfillment such as to be the harbinger of Europe's imminent destruction;I certainly don't have in mind the material destruction of Europe, but of what it represents, symbolizes, stands for.
However this fulfillment, which is equally a destruction, is yet to take place;or rather to reach its final stage, because what has been going on since the days of the War of Independence in the US , which here serve as a rough and practical milestone, is probably nothing else than a multifacetted,heterogeneous process ,operating at different speed levels , of disintegration of Europe.This disintegration is not unlike what Heidegger describes in his interpretation of the History of Western metaphysics ; it is a process that is constantly dying ,but never dead.It would seem that Europe, the Europeanization of the planet------------and what we call globalisation, equating with the US, is verily the very latest , and perhaps the last, gasp of Europeanization,-----------were that strange beast , born during the Renaissance , ushered into maturity with the rise of Protestantism, which can only live as long as it is moribund and agonizing.Its sickness is the source of its strength, and its strength is the ultimate purveyor of disease, suffering, and death.