Defense of Truth

At the base of the Statue of Liberty, symbol of arrival on the shores of freedom for immigrants from Europe for more than a century now, is inscribed a sonnet describing the statue and its symbolic function penned by Emma Lazarus, a Jew from a prominent long-established American family, entitled The New Colossus. In Lazarus's immortalized words, the statue beckons: "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore; Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" (read the whole sonnet here ) In the close of John Ashcroft's speech, he referenced this poem in connection with his own feeling of pride as a youth in the superiority of the US in almost all areas of human activity. Why are we so much better than every other country out there, he thought? The arrogance of the very question is striking to those who presuppose American hubris. Is it not hypocritical for a...

As part of my dissertation, I'm preparing to study the problem of the concept of "Nation" (as opposed to state, or ethnicity) in Africa. It's a particularly knotty problem in a lot of ways. First, one of the conditions the world imposes on itself is that there be states, governmental entities, with sovereign control over territories (whether they choose to enforce borders, or any other measure of their sovereignty is another matter and does not touch the at least formal equality of sovereignty that is assumed to exist among all nations of the world for the purposes of international communication, trade, diplomacy, and all other relations). The globe has been mapped, and boundaries have been in place, imposed or not, and now circumscribe groups of people which derive their rights only as citizens of states. African states cannot "enter", as it were, conditions of modernity, or any rapport with the world outside, without first developing states which operate ...