Customer Reviews

The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World

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To the person who says that the US doesn't care for democracy, maybe you should read the book. He clearly states in his essay that the reason for the book is that it seems fairly clear to him that the message we are sending out with our foreign policies and even our domestic policies is that we don't care about democracy or perhaps just choose to give it lip service. And it's about time that we started to take it as seriously as we say we do.

One look at the conservative agenda and their new stance of calling any dissent treason (see ann coulter, et al) and the dismissal of true democratic notions seems more clear than ever.

Let's get back to writing reviews for edification rather than merely pointing out our own ideologies.

It's an intelligent questioning book that will hopefully meet its obvious agenda about raising the level of our discourse on the subject of terror, security and above all, democracy.

The title itself is absurd, the US has never or does not care a hoot about democracy in any meaningful sense of the word. As William Blum shows in his books Killing Hope and Rogue State, the US has propped up endless numbers of dictators and human rights violating regimes all across the world. If the US government cared about democracy in the world they would stop intervening in the affairs of other peoples, stop plundering their resources and murdering their citizens.

As Mark Hand writing in Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org) points out about the Tomasky essay, "Tomasky's belief in invading a country for its own good represents American liberalism in its most classic sense. Liberals are secular missionaries whose aim is to travel the country and the world, sermonizing about the sanctity of American culture and government. Tomasky's essay shows how establishment liberals aren't far removed at all from the much-maligned neocons running the Bush adminstration - both groups are committed to a radically interventionist U.S. foreign policy."

This nicely sums up the imperial apologist intent of The Fight is for Democracy. Now that computerized voting machines have put the final nail in the coffin of formal democracy in the US (due to their easy manipulation by corporations or vote riggers) why don't the Packerites just come out and say it: we are all neocons now.

Richard Wilcox, Tokyo

This collection of essays amounts to a ringing endorsement of George W. Bush's foreign policy or--alternatively--John Kerry's "multilateral" version of the same thing.

None of them question the right of the USA to police the world. During the 1980s Berman backed the Nicaraguan contras. In the 1990s he defended NATO bombing in the Balkans. His latest crusade against Moslems angered at Western oil companies bleeding their countries dry is obviously to be expected.

Todd Gitlin is well-known for his attacks on 1960s radicals who refused to back Hubert Humphrey for President. Such a proclivity for warmaking Democrats would lead one to question whether he truly understands the meaning of patriotism. Peace and noninterference are far more patriotic than flag-waving and war-whooping.

Kanan Makiya is an Iraqi intellectual who was on the front lines urging war in Iraq. And so on.

This book is not worth the paper it is written on.