Is there an American Identity
One of the habits that I cultivated over my years at graduate school is to read any thhing remotely connected with my major area of interest which happens to be historiography. And so when I came across a new title ofessor Samuel Huntington, an old friend, I could not resist the temptation of reading. Huntington is worth reading for two reasons. First an impressive academic pedigree. Trained at an East coast University and holding the chair in the Department of Government at Harvard make him a class apart. Second he has served on the Staff of the NSA and hence is acquainted with the ins and outs of Beltway politics. One can expect Huntinngton to pull few punches, given his position in the academic world. Yet his latest book, Who are We is a great disappointment because our author has exchanged the quill of the scholar for the Word Processor of a present day apologist for America and her self appointed role on the world stage.
Hunttington is the auhor of a notorious tract which a la Toynbee was called Clash of Civilizations. In this book he argued that a Democratic West will find itself in conflict with Islam and the " fault lines" of that conflict lie in the Middle Esat. It is easy to see how an innocent academic excersise can become a self fulfilling tragedy. Under the relentless pursuit of a reckless foreign policy
by the neo conservatives a monumental trgedy is unfolding in the Middle East especially Iraq. Scholars unfortunately are not held
accountable for the murder and mayhem unheashed in the name of the ideas and ideologies they help [rocreate. I am sure that
if Karl Marx were around today he will condemn the Holocault unleashed in his name by Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao. Thus Huntington
cannot escape answering for the wholesale killing that is now taking place in the Killing Fields of Mesopotamia.
His latest book is a song to the glory of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America. Our writer seems to forget that the USA is based on the principle of the separation of Church and State. The reason for this is due to the influence of the political ideas of the Enlightenment which advocated a secular polity in which religion would be confined to the private sphere. Samuel Hunttington is giving legitimacy to the idea of a state religion in the form of a multi denominational Protestanism when he taks of the American Creed. Further, he should be aware that Islam and Roman Catholic faiths are growing at a much higher rate than any other comprable faith and in less than 100 years WASP America will go the way of Sparta and Athens, into History. This being the case
why does Huntington speak of Anglo Saxon Protestentism as the foundational creed of the USA.
Though I disagree with the analysis of Hunttington, I do respect a system that celebrates the right of the indididual to express his/her ideas freely. I think that USA will be USA until that day disappears. This belief in individual choice and freedom has nothing to do with Protestantism {remember the Salem Witch Trials}. It is the creed of the American People and let no Harvard don take away that fundamental right that inheres by virtue of being a member of a political family.