Estranged from America

As you all know, the button directing you to an English version of a text is usually the British flag.

However, when I created my site decades ago, I preferred the American flag. I was a citizen of the free world grateful for the protection of Pax Americana, and I deeply felt for the USA after Sept. 11. So until quite recently, the top part of my home page looked like this:

However, in the last fifteen years or so, the USA has progressively disappointed me with its adoption of the totalitarian far-left DEI ideology, and with its betrayal first of Georgia and then of Ukraine. Back in 1994, the USA had pressured Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal, promising to defend it in return with the Budapest Memorandum. And now, when Russia was attacking Ukraine, grabbing its land, killing its people and destroying its cities, Obama cynically said: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” Things became only worse after Obama, culminating with the current US president Trump openly siding with Russia and joining its effort to destroy Ukraine.

I wouldn't blame any US voter who has cast a ballot for Trump. The alternative looked like an empty-headed puppet who would continue Biden's policy of supporting Ukraine in words while bleeding it to death. However, when Trump  showed his true colors as Putin's puppet, Americans should have taken to the streets to riot. Nothing of this sort happened. The same citizens who had rioted over the death of one suspect at the hands of the police, now hardly made a beep. To them, Ukraine is apparently just some far-away place, with a population too white to be of any value.

To me, as to many other Eastern Europeans born in the years of communism, America was a shining city upon a hill, a pillar both of the world I lived in and of my inner world. Now that the city upon the hill has fallen to evil, not only has my hope for a better future diminished, but parts of my inner world are crumbling. And I am asking myself, has the better future even the slimmest chance to come if it is self-destructive? I had excused bad people as products of bad societies, and had hoped that by making the society better, we would pave the way for better and happier people. For I had believed that freedom and prosperity make people flourish and allow them to unfold their best talents. However, this optimistic worldview crashed into the facts, as freedom and prosperity bred evil losers in front of my eyes. Of course, not all Americans are evil losers, maybe even not the majority (yet); but they are apparently enough to determine the course of America's policy.

So I decided to remove the American flag from my site. I wasn't in a hurry because I had more urgent things to do. But most of these urgent tasks were completed yesterday, and today, with a lot of huffing and puffing, I edited my page. Now, it looks like this: