Brilliant article by Eric Garland about the myths driving US urge to intervene in Syria.
20th Century Myths
19 Thursday Sep 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
19 Thursday Sep 2013
Posted in Uncategorized
Brilliant article by Eric Garland about the myths driving US urge to intervene in Syria.
Night Owl's Notebook 
While I agree in a broad sense with Eric Garland’s view that old assumptions about the U.S. role in the world are often not relevant to problems today, calling those assumptions “myths”–as he does over and over, before, during, and after identifying them–does not seem accurate. They existed, right or wrong, as actual bases for actual action. What assumptions should replace them, and what actions, is a matter so vexing that hardly any two commentators agree on them.
Garland himself doesn’t help on that score, or so it seems to me.
Garland may have overused the word myth, but I find it hard to quarrel with his labelling those three assumptions/beliefs as myth. Acting on a myth does not make it less of a myth. My definition of myth, by the way, is something one wants to believe regardless of its truth.
My definition of myth would be similar to Night Owl’s but not identical– e.g. something many people believe despite a lack of any evidence in support of it. Akin to H.L. Mencken’s definition of faith: “An irrational belief in the occurrence of the improbable…In effect the man of faith says ‘let us trust in God who has always fooled us in the past.'” What Garland calls myths are, by my lights, debatable points of view. I’m dwelling on this not as a semantic quibbler (although I am that for sure) but as an enemy of all forms of hyperbole in political discourse, equally on my side as on the side of those I disagree with.