Message #69445

[Bianca]

The majority…except for the rest of the world



While it might have been true right after 9/11 that the hawkish viewpoint constituted a numerical majority in the USA, a couple of years later the opposition to a preëmptive strike against Iraq rose to the millions in the USA and to the hundreds of millions throughout the rest of the world. In every major city across the globe, masses of humanity arose to protest Washington’s plan. The war promoters were so hugely outnumbered that the New York Times declared there to be “two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion" (Feb. 16, 2003).

This scenario brings to light yet another layer of un-integrated Saturn. To what extent do international viewpoints factor into America’s Reality Show?

We have seen that rigorous accuracy is not the driving force behind America’s sense of majority opinion, even its own national majority opinion. Much has been written about the tendency of the US government to minimize the numbers of domestic dissidents (by refusing them access to media; by contesting their reports or resorting to character assassination [e.g. global warming scientists, Joseph Wilson]; by undercounting mass demonstrations), thus manipulating the country’s sense of what constitutes received wisdom in the USA. But the faux-majority gambit becomes qualitatively more outrageous when we consider how it allows Americans to summarily dismiss the perspectives of the other countries of the world. (4)

A distorted Saturn is nothing if not provincial. Following the lead of their government, Americans by and large give global opinion very little attention. They accept quite readily their leaders’ cataloguing of other nations into two groups: “allies” or potential objects of conquest (or, as it is demurely being framed, the lucky recipients of new, improved regimes).