In an ongoing N.Y. Time's poll asking readers if their sense of "Patriotism…has changed" since the 11 September tragedy at the WTC, I sent a short answer - below being a longer development on the same theme.

Among my American friends and contacts living overseas, I am not at all alone in expressing the below opinions concerning America's international record. And among foreigners I know, after some 28 years working and living abroad, similar opinions are decisively more openly expressed. Even among those who feel, as does any person with a balanced mind, that the 11 September attacks against civilians were totally unjustified - regardless of the justice underlying the grievances against American political policies and business practices abroad.

Grievances, it should be pointed out, that extend beyond Arab peoples, and not only just to other petroleum exporters such as Indonesia, Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria, et al, which represent only those countries grossly defrauded of their oil wealth. For there are other resource-rich nations with more grievances against America's cooperation with tyrants of various ideologies and politics, where vast majorities also live in continuous poverty.

It has not at all changed since 11 September. It barely exists.

Since learning - firstly, as a civilian intelligence officer managing a Vietnam Province, 1967/8 - just how consistently our government lies, fabricates and covers-up what can't be excused, I believe claims of "Patriotism" made by anyone except the young or naive most likely result from some combination of fear and ignorance ....that is, when not simply self-serving, as is most commonly the case, particularly with government dependent workers.

Later, once understanding the true history behind our forty year aggressions in Indochina (1945-1985, both covert and overt), I researched, read and experienced much else concerning US government and corporate economic exploitation and outright criminality. Actions overseas mostly, but also at home. Such an education helps determine an honest basis for feelings of Patriotism, helps clarify national myths and false history. Shows us what may be true and what may be indoctrination blindly to be accepted without thinking beyond briefing manuals and TV news programs.

(When seeking opinions on Patriotism one must also be aware of the vast number of Americans who work in some area of that octopus nominated the "National Security State" by sage commentators. Statistically it is the largest Industrial grouping in the world: now employing somewhere over ten million workers producing products and services totaling over fifty percent (50%) of the US Gross National Product)

With little abstract sense of patriotism - it's usual, unreflective, emotional side - I admit to maintaining some hope that the good ideals of many Americans will slowly continue to awake to the reality behind the distortions, lies, hypocrisies and false history they have been so well propagandized with over many years. Going back to America's first Arcadian-minded founders, who thought they were escaping from the continuous racism, religious bigotry, corruption, wars, persecutions and all the other vices they called the Old World "evils" in Europe. In reality, though, the first generations of Americans simply repressed those social pathologies imported into their 'New World' as they committed those same evils: first upon all Native Americans, then upon African Blacks, then upon our neighbors and, finally, each wave of minority immigrates. Later these evils were re-exported through Central and South America, until America's leaders post-World War II have studiously enriched those worst parts of Machiavellian politics of exploitation into a highly sophisticated business-political art form.

Whereby Europe's violent examples founded US, we now lead them in more sophisticated forms of those very same exploitations of the 'other'. For example, slavish, class-ruled England is aggressively proud resting behind, and picking up the crumbs from, Uncle Sam's military and economic powers; while with more independent France, she flavors aesthetically humane disdain with touches of mentor jealousy at our vast neo-colonialist profiteering. Even some Germans speculate that the Third Reich possibly could have lasted a 1000 years, if he had not perpetrated so much violence against fellow Europeans but, instead, had copied Anglo-American policies by centering his racial superiority complexes on enslaving, exploiting and murdering 'inferiors' in the Third World. As the Prime Minister of Italy, Monsignor Silvio Berlusconi, bluntly but honestly reiterated the other day - stating Machismo beliefs solidly within the accepted guidelines of all those elitist superiority complexes historically founding the West's inhumane feudalism and savage colonialism.

There rests my patriotism! With the working class American people only. Not at all with our leaders, neither with the nastiness and inhumanity of our Western heritage nor our various recent governments. Whether elite Republican or Democrat, they have been usually managed at similarly unethical and or illegal levels, selling-out their pocketbooks, minds and souls to Big Business. Thereby blatantly compromising the honesty, integrity and equity of our idealistically founded systems of republican government and capitalist economics. Fleeing the iniquities of Old Europe, America has wound up building an iniquitous degradation of most everyone below the top 10-20 percent of the public. As a number of economists and social analysts, from Galbraith and Chomsky at MIT onwards, have well shown in substantial publications.

So, hopefully, maybe this tragedy will somehow prove a catalyst, helping the people begin to dispel some of the historical, political and cultural ignorance under which they have been nurtured and media inundated. A system the US oligarchy - by far the most sophisticated greed merchants in the world - counts upon to continue its efficient economic exploitation of the "other" everywhere in lays it bloody hand.

If we do learn, and change our policies, possibly America will stop being counted one of the most distrusted, disliked, even hated, countries operating in the Third World. Similarly, by many in Europe where people on the street often classify US as first-rate hypocrites of greed.

Only when Americans so educate themselves on what the government really does in their name overseas shall we also stop being the only country in the world, outside of Israel, whose embassies, cultural centers, tourist and visa offices, etc. often appear like prisons - managed and protected as if forts in the middle of dangerous Indian territory. If we do not think more honestly and clearly, and so learn from these attacks, but merely retaliate with historical Western aggressiveness against that "other", there will be more to come. Maybe acts even more devastating and inhumane.

Is it any wonder that while most foreigners tend to like us as individuals they also consider Americans generally unconscious about different cultures and values, naive about any history not directly effecting their personal security? Perhaps this national narrowness of perception is why many people in rich America are more insecure in their own so-well-policed homesteads than peoples elsewhere; as well, insecure when out in the larger world where their self-centered paranoia has been noted a not uncommon symptom.

Tragedy can teach us lessons about how to live happily, without mind-dumbing consumer baubles, bangles and beads, or it can cause us to build even denser racial and economic superiority complexes bunkered against the other.

We can either live our lives with the goal of helping each other or continue allowing our leaders to perfect the means to exploit others. In the middle, where most people sit, lies the sleepy and slippery path of moral cowardice, upon which public ignorance produces public fears: both used by a small minority of elite to promote aggression as a means to profiteer against others, regardless the casualties and misery strewn behind.

richard manning

Antibes, France