Why Must Writers Always Denigrate Our Flawless Nation? Whichever Flawless Nation It May Be?

There's a truly interesting piece in the New Yorker this week by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk:

Last February, in an interview published in a Swiss newspaper, I said that “a million Armenians and thirty thousand Kurds had been killed in Turkey”; I went on to complain that it was taboo to discuss these matters in my country.

So, what's happened to him for breaking this taboo?

In Istanbul this Friday [...] I will stand before a judge. My crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”

Wow, what monsters they are in Turkey! Thank god we don't have anyone like that here!

Except of course for the 1996 Republican presidential nominee!

The purpose of the National History Standards seems not to be to teach our children certain essential facts about our history but to denigrate America's story while sanitizing and glorifying other cultures. This is wrong and it threatens us as surely as any foreign power ever has.

That's from a speech Bob Dole gave to the America Legion on September 5, 1995. The National History Standards had recently been promulgated by the Department of Education. Dole's speech was part of an attempt by the U.S. right wing (including Lynne Cheney) to intimidate historians who brought up things like, say, slavery.

Here's something else Dole said:

...this country is the living result of one of history's most magnificent ideas.

Now, this is in some sense true. But there is an iron rule in American politics: the people who continually blather about the greatness of America are always those who want to destroy the parts of America that are great. America is great because we have freedom of speech! they will say, as they actively work to squelch freedom of speech. Their message is always:

Because it is possible to criticize America, you must never criticize America