author: Gary Younge
content: "I have always found America exciting; but, for better or worse, never exceptional.\
  \ Its efforts at global domination seemed like a plot development in the narrative\
  \ of European empire rather than a break from it. Even as the French lambasted secretary\
  \ of state Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council, protesters in Abidjan,\
  \ the capital of Ivory Coast, waved American flags and placards saying: \"Bush please\
  \ help Ivory Coast against French terrorism.\" There was precious little moral high\
  \ ground to go round. Yet everyone, it seemed, was making a stake on it.\r\n\r\n\
  So it was with great bemusement that I found myself having to absorb abuse from\
  \ white, rightwing Americans, who harked back to the Declaration of Independence\
  \ of 1776 and the second world war to justify military aggression in Iraq. They\
  \ badgered me as though their own reference points represented the sole prism through\
  \ which global events could possibly be understood. As if the struggle for moral\
  \ superiority between Europe and the US could have any relevance to someone whose\
  \ ancestors were brought to the Americas as slaves and whose parents and grandparents\
  \ lived through the war under European colonisation.\r\n\r\n\"If it wasn't for us,\
  \ you would be speaking German,\" they would say. \"No, if it wasn't for you,\"\
  \ I would tell them, \"I would probably be speaking Yoruba.\" "
id: c972d335-cdc0-490d-8399-a4be5d47429a